Episode 280

In this episode of the Unscripted Podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes Joe Molesky, SVP at Sodexo for a conversation about why leadership is so important in service today when it comes to attracting quality talent and creating an effective culture, how his own approach has evolved over his career, and the role mindfulness plays in his leadership today.

As a leader known for his expertise in enterprise transformation, Joe is committed to driving improvement across all areas of business. His focus lies on executing strategies that create significant value for customers. Joe's goal is to design actionable plans, build inclusive teams, optimize operations, and foster a high-performance culture centered on delivering exceptional customer value.

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The Show Notes

Joe - 00:00:00:

The inflection point for me was seeing a really high-functioning team that I built, put them under undue stress, and actually did not achieve the results I would have expected. That's where I really had to think about it. And it goes to that the ways of working have changed. People's expectations have changed. People are more aware of themselves, right? They're more aware of how they fit into the world than we ever have. And you don't see the culture of I need to mimic leadership. You see more of a culture of people that have superpowers that want to apply those but still maintain their sense of individuality, not put on the suit, not put on the badge and become a different person for 10 hours a day. Having the respect for this is the person, these are their superpowers, that's been a big part of the change.

Sarah - 00:00:54:

Welcome to the Unscripted Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are going to be talking about why the future of field service depends so significantly on leadership. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Joe Molesky, who is the SVP at Sodexo. Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe - 00:01:30:

Hey, thank you for having me today. Appreciate it.

Sarah - 00:01:32:

Thanks for being here. So before we get into the topic of the day, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, anything you want to share about your background, your current role, and maybe some context on Sodexo as well.

Joe - 00:01:44:

No, just starting out with my personal background, I'm based out of the Minneapolis area. I was born and raised on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, which I think is pretty significant. I have a family there that's very blue-collar, hardworking group of people. Luckily, I got that from my family up there. And it also exposed me early in my life even to the challenges between leadership and frontline employees, listening to the conversation that holidays, etc. The debate between leadership and union employees that were going on. And I was found it interesting. So those roots are very important to me and they still are to this day. After I left the Iron Range, I went to college, went out to Washington State for a while back to Minnesota. Fast forward to today. I'm the proud dad of a 16-year-old daughter, amazing child. And it's cool watching her grow up and getting to be a father in that way. So she's hitting her junior year. We did our first college visit recently. Which was fun to see. So on the professional side, I would say I won the job lottery right out of college and I got to work at a company called. Coldspring Granite at the time, and it's now Coldspring USA in central Minnesota. And my first role was a continuous improvement specialist. Where I was leading teams of five to 12 people two or three times a month on both business process improvements, Six Sigma, you name it, literally hundreds of projects that the reason I say I won the job lottery is I got to hone my skills around quickly getting to understand people and moving a team in a direction towards a set of goals really quickly. By 25, I was a plant manager. And a few years later, I cut my teeth in service, which we're talking about today, while at Tennant Company and working for a great mentor still to this day in Terry Diaferio. And he really taught me a lot about field service and the differences that needed to be understood there. Currently, my role at Sodexo is Senior Vice President of Operations for Corporate Services on the FM side. Most folks, when they think of Sodexo, think of soup. And that's because that's how Sodexo was founded in the late 60s in Paris, France, was on what I would call the first workplace experience innovation, which was bringing food forward to the workplace. In my role, we lead FM, so facilities management, which includes everything from painting to operating boilers. We deliver 216 distinct services to our customers in the field. And so while we do have food, a large portion of Sodexo is related to FM, both in North America and globally.

Sarah - 00:04:28:

Very good. And how long have you been with Sodexo?

Joe - 00:04:31:

I've been with Sodexo now just going on a year, just showed up a year. And it's been interesting to learn, as you know, Sodexo is a very big organization. And the different layers, understanding our leadership team and where they're going, and then translating that down into my organization and setting our path has been the first call, the first 90 days at a lot of companies, we'll call it the first nine months at Sodexo, just because it is a big business to get to understand.

Sarah - 00:04:57:

So when we were chatting about this topic, you described to me that your leadership style used to be heads down, horns up, and that that has changed significantly. So first of all, can you kind of explain what you mean by heads down, horns up? And then, you know, compare that to where you are today and some of the reasons that you knew you needed to evolve your approach.

Joe - 00:05:25:

So the head down, horns up. It's one of my, I've been using that description for years. And it actually started in my time at Coldspring where I was a CI specialist and would go out with teams and truly time after time get really good results. I even received the nickname at one point of Bulldog. And so my approach was celebrated. And it was an approach of there was no mindfulness to the team, no mindfulness to the current environment. It was, here's the productivity target, we were asked to reach. Here's the quality target. We're going to go get it. And we don't care what happens around us, the impact around us. And when I realized I needed to change, and when I actually started affecting change, were two different periods in time. There was a engineer at Coldspring that I worked with that came up to me one day and said, you really need to think about your approach. Literally his words. And I said, what do you mean? He said, when you go back for your 60 or 90 day reviews of your projects, a lot of them are backsliding. I said, yeah. And he said, it's based on your approach. And he gave me some coaching. His name was Tom Howler. I took that on, but didn't really start to actualize that for probably another 10 years. And so where I really started was in my time at a tenant company where we had a very intense transformation underway. And that translated into how I work every day. And personally, I saw a need to change. And then I saw it within my team as well. I didn't realize it, but I was living on the edge of burnout every single day of my career for years. And I was translating that to my team. I didn't have a sense of mindfulness. I didn't honestly really care where my team was at. All I cared about was hitting a result. Where I started to see the big need to change is when I... Started seeing turnover, really high-performing people struggling that were on my team, I saw a need to change. Where I really got into that is, and I'll talk more about her as we go, about five years ago, I started working with a coach in the mindfulness and meditative space really to develop myself personally. And that created a whole new view of the world for me and understanding myself first, and then being able to understand and empathize more with where my team is at. And so my leadership style has evolved to what I call mindful intensity. There's still, the intensity is still there, it still needs to be there, but it's more about when, where, and how you apply that intensity than having that switched on, being able to use your different emotions, your different levels of intensity at the right moment in time for the right purpose and the right person.

Sarah - 00:08:10:

So I have a couple questions about what you just shared. So you said Tom is the gentleman who gave you that feedback, right? And what was his role?

Joe - 00:08:19:

He was an engineer.

Sarah - 00:08:21:

So first, good on Tom for speaking up because often one of the side effects of a bulldog approach is silence. People don't want to tangle. And obviously, there's a lot of ripple effects that can come from that. So good for Tom for being brave enough to bring you that feedback. So I have two questions about it. One is, what was your initial reaction internally?

Joe - 00:08:52:

My initial reaction was one of surprise where the way he described me as kind of the head down, horns up approach. He gave me more details that people see you as arrogant and dismissive. And I saw myself as confident and driven. And I'm like, well, I see this in my one side and then I hear Tom over here. But then I took his feedback on the results and kind of went, okay, this is making sense. I can see how that could be the perspective. But at first I was taken aback. I just thought I was confident and off as pure arrogance.

Sarah - 00:09:25:

And so it's interesting that, and I guess credit to you for that reaction of surprise versus dismissiveness versus ego versus power trip or any number of things that you might expect from someone who has that approach. But also, I think it's interesting that what really got your attention was the tie back to the performance metrics. And I think it's an important point to underpin for people because, again, when we start talking about the impact of leadership and how we treat people and the culture we're creating and the employee experience, there are still groups of people that see all of that as soft. And so just the real evidence of tying it back to performance, you know, it wasn't him coming to you and saying, now, I'm not saying you didn't consider this over time, right? But it wasn't him saying, like, here's how you're making people feel that got your attention. It was, here's how your approach is perceived and here's how it's affecting performance, right? So it's just an anecdotal proof point that these things aren't soft. There is evidence upon evidence upon evidence that treating people well will improve performance more so than that bulldog mentality or approach. So my next question then is, you mentioned there was about 10 years before you took that feedback that you didn't dismiss. You know, you really took in and considered, but actually put action behind it. So why so long?

Joe - 00:11:07:

Yeah, I would say there was hints of it before then. It really came back in, again, to your point, as a matter of just realizing as my team size grew, my impact grew in an organization and it spread wider and wider, I understood slowly at the time the importance of each and every action and every word as a leader that gets said. So as I started to realize that, and some credit to Terry Diaferio, who was my leader at the time, he would remind me of that constantly. So having him, who was a different type of leader than what I was working with when I was at Coldspring, and not to say either was good or bad, but one of the things we talked about in the past together is the changing evolution, the evolutionary dynamic of senior leadership. And my experience very early on was sitting around a table as the youngest guy in the room, and it was the loudest voice one, not always the best idea. And so that's what I thought it looked like until I was given something. Different to learn from in Terry, where he was still very intense, but yet he brought a different element forward, showed me where I had opportunities to grow. And I was able to draw on those comments from the past and start to put them into play. And really, like I mentioned earlier, the inflection point for me was seeing a really high-functioning team that I built, put them under undue stress, and actually did not achieve the results I would have expected. That's where I really had to think about it. And it goes to that, you know, the ways of working have changed. People's expectations have changed. People are more aware of themselves, right? They're more aware of how they fit into the world than we ever have. And it's not, you don't see the culture of, I need to mimic leadership. You see more of a culture of people that have superpowers that want to apply those, but still maintain their sense of individuality, not put on the suit, not put on the badge, and become a different person for 10 hours a day, having the respect for this is the person, these are their superpowers. That's been a big part of the change.

Sarah - 00:13:13:

So you touched on two important points that, again, I just want to kind of emphasize. One is, and I'm trying to think of how to articulate this, but the way that culture trickles down and out, right? And so this is something that I think particularly when we think about field service and the industries that a lot of the folks that come on or listen to this podcast are in, industries that have a lot of legacy, right? That also brings with it a lot of kind of old school culture and old school thinking. And to your point, it isn't about the people are bad or the intentions are bad or any of that. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it's about the effectiveness isn't there, right? But I think one of the challenges for leaders today is considering how they surround themselves with environment, that are aligned with the approach they feel works because I talked to a good amount of people who are really more modern in their thinking, but surrounded by people who aren't. And that can be very, very challenging. It doesn't mean you can't affect change positively by any means, but I think, you know, there are more limits and more challenges that you encounter when you're not in an overall company culture that is sort of aligned towards some of the same core beliefs, right? The other thing I think is really interesting is, you know, you mentioned what's modeled. Okay. And I think that is true, also evolving, but historically true, both in the environment you were in, but also just sort of like characteristically how men are taught to be strong, right? Like you mentioned that when Tom said that to you, you said, well, wow, he's using these words. I thought it was this. And I just think, you know, we don't have time to even get into this whole discussion, but I think it's very interesting to consider then, you know, we talk often about how women can be perceived in the workplace and how when a man strongly verbalizes an opinion, he's seen as strong. And when a woman does it, she's seen as other things, right? But I think it is also interesting to think about the flip side of that sort of conditioning of if you want to be a strong leader, historically, it looks like X, Y, and Z. And how do we, you know, not only embody a new approach, but shift that narrative to be one that is more aligned to what works with the modern workforce and the workforce of the future?

Joe - 00:16:04:

Yeah, I agree. And I think as we talked about prior, the challenge is amplified in field service, right? I have the luxury of having a career that's in a lot of different industries, different work environments from four walls of manufacturing to quarries to remote sites to field service. And it creates a bigger challenge. And as you talked about, the historical reference that we have has been slower to change in field service, in my opinion, than it has in, say, a manufacturing environment or a retail environment or even in B2C, certainly, that we would consider field services. Think SafeLight, Autoblast, right?

Sarah - 00:16:46:

Sure.

Joe - 00:16:46:

It's a unique industry that way. And we have, as you mentioned, a lot of folks that have come up through the businesses over time are in leadership positions that are still working off of references that are relatively dated. And so, as we talked about, it's been slower and it's been a bigger challenge. And it creates a culture where, especially in field service, we continue to see our best service providers becoming our leaders. And quite often, we're not preparing them along the way for that transition. And to make it even more difficult in field service, right? If you're in manufacturing and there's 20 other supervisors and 800 people in the building. You have examples every day of what good looks like from how they interact with their team, how they talk about KPIs, how they draw results. And you have bad examples that you want to avoid. When you're in a field service environment, you're on your own. So, if your senior leader is simply pushing a P&L at you and saying, your P&L defines your performance for the year, that's it. That's really old school. And that's still happening at some of the biggest brands we know today, not helping us move the leadership. Our team done that spectrum down, developing to that new leadership style. It's actually reinforcing and perpetuating kind of the path. In some cases, some will see that as micromanagement when we're talking just about the MBOs are managing by the P&L, but I think that's been the end result that we have to start to convert Trump.

Sarah - 00:18:18:

Yeah, so there's this idea of micromanagement, I think. And how would you contrast that then with this P&L-centric management?

Joe - 00:18:28:

Yeah, so as I was thinking about this topic, you think about the end-of-pipe metrics, T&L performance, things like that that have been historical in field services. You've got the traditional structure where there might be a regional manager with other field managers within there. And if we have one set of things we're focused on only and we pound those on a daily basis, it can create bad decision-making, right? It's very narrow in focus and can create some bad decisions. Whereas you start to span out, like I mentioned, the opposite is something that I'm even more concerned about, which is an utter lack of management, right? Where I've seen in the field service industry, we put our technicians out in the field. We put KPIs out there. We send them out to do work. And as long as those KPIs look okay, we're hands-off. We only focus where something doesn't look right. And the risk with that is we don't know. We may not know how those results were achieved. You don't dig into it and understand it. So that lack of management or that lack of oversight in the field can be just as detrimental as micromanagement. And finding that right way of working, that right balance between allowing the freedom of the team to take advantage of their superpowers and strength with just enough organization and structure, we're all moving along together. And I think

Sarah - 00:19:53:

Maybe oversight reinforces the idea of micromanagement in some ways, but it's more so engagement, staying engaged. What are they encountering? I had a gentleman from Tetra Pak on a couple of months ago, and we talked about a whole initiative that they had that started in Europe to understand better just kind of like the mindset of their technicians. And he talked about a survey they did, but I really loved some of the questions that they asked because it wasn't as formulaic as some that you might think. You know, they actually asked, like, what makes you feel proud in your role? When do you feel most supported? When do you feel not supported? Like things where it's this idea of understanding both what are the teams feeling fulfilled by in their roles and how can you amplify those? And then also where do the challenges lie and how can you remove some of those barriers? Right. So it's kind of oversight to me feels maybe even too transactional for like the mentality we're talking about. It's more engagement and like this concept of some of the things we're going to talk about and understanding and building relationships with your team and considering their strengths and all of those types of things.

Joe - 00:21:12:

Yeah, there's symptoms of the past still when we talk about micromanagement. But you think back a few of years. You'd have a guy show up to install something at your home. And before he left, he would give you his personal cell phone number and say, if there's any issues, call me. Why was he doing that or why was she doing that? Because from a micromanagement perspective, that KPI was only used in a negative way. It wasn't from an engagement perspective to say, geez, we had an issue with an install. Where did it break down? It was a technician avoiding getting a ding in their KPI. So they're having a negative conversation, it sounds like a simple shift but to shift to it's okay to have an install not go great as long as we can go back and understand what happened and engage that technician rather than dumping the technician it's a mind shift there but you still have to get over the hurdle of people are still used to a lot of people are still used to those KPIs from a micromanagement perspective being used to bludgeon yeah then to understand where the business is letting the technician down where they weren't able to be successful a big shift that is still underway that i think is again been a little bit slower to take hold in our world of field services than other sectors

Sarah - 00:22:28:

Absolutely. And the way you just said that is perfect. Where is the business letting the technicians down? It's shared responsibility, not blame. And you're absolutely right that particularly technicians that have been around a while, they are very well programmed to be more fear-based and to expect that mentality. So let's talk a little bit about the importance in leadership today to recognize and understand the different strengths you have in your team, or teams, and then position your team members to succeed.

Joe - 00:23:04:

Yeah, the huge part, I talked about it a bit at the field service conference a while back, and recognizing talent and where your team is at is vitally important. And I'll go back again, that really starts with understanding yourself and whatever that takes. There's tools and there's programs for that, everything from the well-known disk to the strength finder to a number of different ones that I've got here. We can share later, but really it starts with understanding ourselves, understanding what our strengths, where our weak spots are, right? And there's a tool I use at the very beginning, whenever I'm bringing in a new leader or when I'm joining an organization that I would recommend people use called new leader assimilation. It's very basic, very easy to execute, but it gives you a leg up on helping your team understand you as well. And I'll give you an example. Like with myself, I understand that I can, I love highly engaging in conversation backed in data and facts, but I can become frustrated if it's a conversation that drones on based on opinion rather than data and facts. I'll share that with my team when I first meet them. This is something I know about myself. You should know about me. Once you have a strong understanding of yourself and you're building a team, if we take it from that angle, you have to be able to quickly assess and understand the team you have and the pieces that you also need. And that is beyond the technical, right? When you get to a certain point in your career, the technical elements stream out on the resume. It's really what makes the difference is what you mentioned earlier is the formerly labeled soft, what separate especially leadership or leaders from the high-performing leaders from the low-performing leaders. So when I get with my team, like I said, understanding myself and then getting a really good, strong understanding of them and what their superpowers are. There's an example I like to give. When I assembled a team in my past, I had been accused of assembling strange-looking teams. That tend to perform highly. But I knew I had a Jason that was highly technical. And if I had a harebrained idea, I needed to run it by Jason because he was going to fill in all the gaps. If we had a new initiative or strategy rolling out that we needed to be communicated, well, I had John. John was the best communicator on my team. He led the charge there. So from understanding yourself, understanding the strengths of your team, and then putting them in those positions to take advantage of those strengths is vital. And understanding and really getting the team to understand that where they're going to succeed best is being their true self. Not trying to be me, not trying to be Tim, not trying to be Becky or anybody else, but really getting people comfortable with being their genuine self, focusing on their team, understanding their team, putting them in the right position to create better than expected results. There's other elements that I think are important within that. From coaching, right? I sat in a session at Sodexo the other day, and we were talking about how often one-on-ones are happening, everywhere from weekly to every six months, right? Well, how do you apply the really basic tools, really basic understanding to strength assessments, all those things, your personal observations to put people in a successful spot?

Sarah - 00:26:29:

I think as you're describing this, I'm kind of thinking in my mind, one of the initial objections I can imagine people would service is that's too time-consuming. Which I think is interesting because, you know, when we think about, and obviously this is a broad generalization of all of field service, right, and which is a lot of different industries. But generally speaking, we've witnessed a shift of service as a cost center where it was very transactional success, very formulaic, which I think is where this, you know, ability to drive through KPIs came from, or at least when it worked, right? Because it was something breaks, it needs fixed, it needs fixed fast, it needs fixed well, and if we can do that, we're winning, right? To service as a profit center. Service as a potential competitive disadvantage. Service as often a new revenue stream, et cetera, et cetera. It's not formulaic anymore, right? There isn't just an easy recipe for success, and therefore, people become the critical asset. And understanding then how you position these various strengths to create something truly compelling and to give your customers whatever it is that they want, that they can't easily get elsewhere. You can't do that managing by P&L, to your point. It becomes like, yes, it's time-consuming, but what's the alternative? You know, the alternative is being disrupted. The alternative is, you know, becoming competitively obsolete. So I just think it's really interesting how a lot of the skills or evolution of skills that we're talking about is also rooted in the evolution of service and its role within the business. Does that make sense?

Joe - 00:28:24:

Yeah. It does. And I think we're going to start to get to a topic that's really near and dear to me when we talk about how we start to make that shift that you're talking about, right? I'll share a brief example I've shared in the past that will maybe get us going down that path. And really, I'll underline it under the guise of mindful leadership and give a quick example of what less than mindful leadership looks like, and then we can dive into it. The story is about my uncle when he worked for U.S. Steel and the steel mines. He was a millwright and he would make parts for the large equipment at the steel mine. And in short, he offered a suggestion for an improvement that would reduce downtime on a belt line. And his supervisor basically told him, I pay you to work with your hands, take your work order, go do your work, get it done. Fast forward to today, right? So in that world, not being mindful of that individual strength, not being in mindful of that individual, my uncle's superpowers and ignoring those versus what you just talked about is where we move forward today. And in this world where we're not just a cost center, our service technicians are the face of our companies and our brands. They deliver a service. They deliver it in a way that creates a lasting impression based on our brand. If a leader... Is a micromanager only dealing with problems, running hot all day, carrying all kinds of baggage through the day. What type of experience is that employee going to have? And then what type of experience is that employee going to translate onto our valued customers or client? So having that mindful leader approach can ensure that, especially in field service, where that person with the uniform showing up at our business or at somebody's home is the lasting memory of Sodexo or name the service company even more important than it has ever been as we go down this continuum. So I think there's a lot we can chat about in that space. And when it comes to making that shift to what I refer to as mindful leadership rather than micromanagement P&L leadership.

Sarah - 00:30:34:

So how would you describe the ideal balance of leadership between sort of the technical skill and tactical approach versus the kind of mindset and ethos?

Joe - 00:30:46:

I think definitely have to be solid in the first element, right? We have to understand our business. We need to know what levers cause what reaction down the line, right? If we're trying to drive for efficiency, quality, customer experience, you have to be flawless in the things, the technical aspects. The further we get from the field through our career and are trying to influence our culture back down, that ratio needs to continue to grow less on the technical side and more on that mindful leadership communication side and what we're saying, how we're saying it, when we're saying it, who we're saying it to. I think that there's a kind of a sliding scale, right? The closer you are to the field, the more technically sound you have to be, but then call it 20 or 30% focus on your people, understanding them and your customers, but then just continue to slide that as you move up the organization. Because you're going to have experts like on my team. I have sourcing experts. I have technical experts. I've got quality experts, safety experts. If they're all set up right, they're going to build a great plan based on what we've communicated. And so I beat them, focusing more on how do we shift culture in the organization while their leaders are focused more on technical. So I know that's not perfectly clear, but it is a sliding scale kind of depending on where you're at within that service organization.

Sarah - 00:32:10:

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, what are some of the facets or traits or practices that you feel are most important in leadership today?

Joe - 00:32:20:

I think being genuine. People are really smart. People are really empathetic. If you're not, you're genuine self, you're already down. You've watched it happen. You try to be something you're not. People will sniff you out immediately and you'll lose credibility. It's okay that people may not like you as long as you're being your true self. You're not going to have everybody that's going to be on your side at all times and you have to be okay with that too. A huge part is truth telling. I always emphasize the importance of transparency and honest feedback. Truth-telling in terms of, especially as, again, you grow up in the organization. The last thing you want to do is be less than transparent. Truth-telling isn't always fun either. You're going to have to tell somebody something they don't want to hear either up the chain or down. But I think it's vitally important that we're transparent and tell the truth, unveiled truth at all times. I think as leaders, another key element is being adept at coaching and not just using coaching as a word blindly, but truly dedicating time to becoming a good coach, a good question asker, a good listener, a good developer, it's a vital skill. And then I throw in things that I think are, these are a little bit newer to the party, but I think they're important. An ability to be paper mindful, saying, be meditative, be mindful, allows you to be your true self, allows you to be focused and genuine. So even the practice of setting intentions, being willing to set intentions for a day or even for a meeting, right? I was just coaching a former employee prior to meeting with you. I've got a much more stressful conversation coming up. So how do I? As a leader, how do I look for somebody who can adapt and adjust? Mindfulness practices of simply taking a deep breath and resetting your energy and your intention towards the next meeting. That's a great way to be like. I even brought a resource with one of the books I use. You can see it's kind of tabbed up. It's called Move to Greatness, where if you need to be in a driver energy, organizer energy, collaborator, visionary, there's even physical movements you can do to help get yourself to that right space. So, like I said, if you go down the list, genuineness, truth-telling, true coaching ability, and mindful leadership are, if those things exist and the technical piece is there, it can do great things.

Sarah - 00:34:43:

So I want to come back to two things quickly. One is the idea of telling the truth up, okay? Because I think truth-telling, very important no matter what, right? Being honest, being transparent, being open, I think is very important. But I think it's probably more likely people struggle with doing that up versus down. To the point I said toward the beginning about the feedback Tom gave you, right? I mean, again, he was telling the truth up because he felt it was important to be transparent and honest, but that's something that it can be tough for a lot of people to do. So what advice do you have on truth-telling up?

Joe - 00:35:23:

Starting first is understanding who you're going to be speaking to and what is their view of the situation, being mindful of that, attempting to remove as much of the emotion from your observation that you're about to share, being fact-based, and being really confident in what you're going to share, especially if it's contradictory to what your leadership team believed to be the case. So the leadership team believed the product is ready to roll out in the field. Quick example, you do your analysis and it absolutely is not. How do you craft your message to your senior leadership team in a way that exposes the truth and says this product is going to cost 2x in annual maintenance than what we had in our pro forma? How do you pass that message in a way where it can be received? And also then act it on and resource to help solve the problem. Understanding your audience and understanding the data and facts. And then lastly, offering alternative paths. Way too often new leaders come into an organization and they're really good at explaining the problem, but they're not good at offering alternative solutions or they haven't been empowered to offer alternative solutions historically. So I always encourage my leaders, come with your problems and come with alternative solutions. And at the same time, when you're, like you said, that truth-telling conversation, that may not be what your leader was expecting to hear that day.

Sarah - 00:36:50:

Good advice. My other question is, at what point and how did you first get into the mindfulness and meditation stuff?

Joe - 00:37:01:

I think I mentioned earlier, maybe about five years ago. And it started on a personal journey, but then developed into the professional side. I started working with my coach. Her name is Jill Summers. Anybody listening and want to look her up, I know she has a couple of available slots for clients right now. But I started working with her on a personal journey, like I mentioned, trying to understand myself better about five years ago. And as I went down through that journey with her, I started making these connections to the workplace. And so I would say in the workplace, it started about three years ago, four years ago. And even you jump forward to today, beyond just how I lead personally, mindfulness has made its way into my teenage world. Sometimes we'll do a breathing exercise. Sometimes we'll be mindful and just, we have an hour meeting. I'll tell, ask everybody who's been at their desk all day. Everybody raises their hand. A mindful gesture is turn off your cameras, go outside for a walk for 10 minutes and come back a little bit of self-care to get you out of your seat.

Sarah - 00:38:02:

So we've been talking a bit about the evolution of your leadership journey and style. How often do you think leaders need to be reflecting on and, as necessary, reimagining or recreating their leadership style?

Joe - 00:38:17:

It's a continuous journey. I don't think there's an end point. There are certain milestones where you're definitely going to have to assess your leadership style, right? Joining a new organization, building a new team, moving to a different element of the organization. Even the most mindful leader, that leadership style may not be appropriate for the time and place that they find themselves in. So I think reassessing continually and making micro-adjustments is the best approach, but also assessing at those big milestone moments, new strategies, new leaders, and just assessing how your style is meshing. Worst-case scenario, if you're just not getting the result. You've got to really look at your leadership style and see where you're missing.

Sarah - 00:39:00:

So you showed us the book and you talked a little bit about how you transition from sort of event to event or pieces of the day. Anything else on how you channel the right energy to bring to your team or to whatever it is that you are responsible for throughout the day?

Joe - 00:39:21:

If you go through the day, it's actually a bigger practice. It starts every day with a similar pattern in the morning. The things that I do to prep for the day, you already mentioned it. It's the things that you do between moments in time and setting yourself up to the next one. I think also vitally important, as we haven't discussed, is having what we all like to refer to as time to focus and stop going meeting to meeting and be mindful of what was in that last meeting. What do I need to follow up on? Who do I need to check in with? And then I also make it a habit to do that at the end of each day, at the end of each week, at the end of each month to continually reflect and then look forward to see what are those challenges coming at me in the next week, month, quarter, or year. So you can start to put your energy in line with that rather than waiting for it to be on your doorstep. I also, when you get into the really micro stuff, Sarah, when people go on vacation, make them go on vacation. Don't call them, don't email them. Just simple little stuff like that that set us up for success so people can truly disconnect, re-energize, and come back to work. It's even little stuff like that where we forget about that quite often.

Sarah - 00:40:36:

Yeah, and I mean, it's not that little, really. It's really, really important. What leadership resources, inspiration, information, et cetera, do you find most valuable? Anything you would share for people to check out that they might not be familiar with or might not think to use, that sort of thing.

Joe - 00:40:57:

So this is going to sound a little silly to start with, but anytime you interact with a service person in your daily life, ask them questions. I had a safe flight due to Red Shield recently. Both technicians were amazing in their pre-trip call, in their follow-up at the end. And I just asked them, how do you know where you're going next? What do you like about your job? How do you know you're having a good day? So learn from them. Other tools to use are ones we know, but maybe haven't used on a daily basis, is something like a disk assessment. They've done so much with disk where now I can go into a meeting at a big company like Sodexo. I can pull up another employee's disk profile, put them side by side, and see what I need to think about mentally to prepare for if I'm going to be going into a meeting with a high C and I'm a high R. I can be mindful of who I'm meeting with. So I'm not just applying Joe to the situation, but I'm being mindful of who I'm sitting across from and how they might receive information. I love reading, and I always encourage people to read books. I'll always have one in my bag. You saw the one on moving to greatness. There's a ton of books around that. The new one I'm reading, I can't recommend it yet, but I can say I'm reading it, is The Conscious Professional by Jessica Hartung. I am a huge proponent of coaches, and that's why I have one in more than one space of my life. So folks like Joe Summers, my coach, who I'm happy to connect anybody to, I highly advise having a professional coach. Either continuously or at certain periods of time. One that's a little bit different that I've found to be a great source of inspiration, no matter how interesting it might be, is actually a masterclass. I downloaded that masterclass. If you haven't heard of it, check it out. But it's everything from business and strategy to how to make a great cup of coffee. But seeing these different folks, different leaders, from Oprah to different political figures, different business leaders, talking about their success. It's been a really cool way to grab eight and ten-minute clips of information to try to draw some inspiration out of. So I thought I'd throw that one in there, even though it's a little bit off the grid. But masterclass has been kind of a cool, creative way for me to think a little bit different recently.

Sarah - 00:43:12:

I like that. I mean, all good things. And I like what you said. The idea of these conversations in this podcast, you know, isn't that anyone needs to try and replicate anyone else's approach or success, but just that you can get some fresh perspective, get some different ideas or inspiration and understand a bit better what others are thinking and doing. And I think there's a lot to gain from that, doing it through things like this, but also masterclass, reading or whatever those ways are that you can sort of broaden your perspective and reflect on what's working well for others.

Joe - 00:43:51:

Yeah. And the last thing I encourage people is to be open about if you are on that journey, like my current team at Sodexo, I shared with them my mindfulness journey and meditative work. Surprisingly, within 10 minutes of that meeting, almost half of my team sent me individual notes, say, hey, guess what, I do that, too. God, I'm a runner. I'm a lifter.

Sarah - 00:44:24:

Yeah.

Joe - 00:44:24:

I do this. It's okay to talk about that, now find, I found. Anyway. Here's a lot more people are. I'll take things to the pandemic or what, but, when you do start to talk about it, you will be surprised how many people are either willing to discuss it or practicing some of those same techniques on their own or are very open to doing those things at work, right? Like, I'll work with my team on, breathing exercises, if we're going to have a challenging meeting, we'll start and do two or three minutes of a box breath before we get started to center everybody in and bring them back in, so.

Sarah - 00:44:54:

Yeah.

Joe - 00:44:54:

It's vitally be willing to talk about it.

Sarah - 00:44:56:

And it's a case study in you being genuine. And we talked about how important that is. So yeah, that's wonderful. Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on and sharing sort of your trajectory thus far and some of what you've learned, some of what's working for you today. I really appreciate it and would love to continue the conversation at some point in the future.

Joe - 00:45:18:

Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity and good luck on future episodes.

Sarah - 00:45:22:

Thank you so much. You can learn more by visiting the home of the UNSCRIPTED podcast at futureoffieldservice.com. There is all sorts of information there on everything from leadership and the talent approach to digital transformation and service transformation and much, much more. So check it out. The UNSCRIPTED podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.