Creating Us - A podcast for Texas Tech University System & beyond
A learning and development podcast focused on bringing the Texas Tech University System Values Based Culture to life.
Creating Us - A podcast for Texas Tech University System & beyond
The Leader Fast Lane - Episode 16 - with Steve Sosland, former Vice Chancellor of Leader & Culture Development at TTUS
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In this episode, I talk with Steve Sosland, Founder & President of Second Mountain Coaching and former Vice Chancellor for Leader & Culture Development at the Texas Tech University System. Steve has decades of experience leading others and training up leaders. There's a lot here for leaders of all stripes. Steve shares:
5:00 - about his Army Ranger experience and what it taught him about leadership
12:21 - his goal to train people for their next role before they are promoted
18:04 - what a values-based culture looks like day-by-day
24:43 - about knowledge hoarders versus knowledge sharers
28:02 - how to build a values culture
44:36 - how "yet" is a powerful word that gives us permission to grow
49:02 - how we have a choice in how we respond to others.
Hello and welcome to the Leader Fast Late, the podcast where I talk with the Compass leaders from higher education, public service, and beyond to share real stories, practical principles, and hard-earned lessons listeners can apply immediately. No buzzwords, no shortcuts, just real leaders sharing real lessons you can apply right away. I'm Lane Mears, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Leader in Culture Development at the Texas Tech University System. Today I am joined by Steve Sosland. Steve is a professional disruptor whose career has been defined by responsibility, purpose, and the pursuit of values-based culture. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and former infantry officer, he learned early on that leadership is less about authority and more about service, trust, and accountability. Over four decades, Steve has been leading positive change in business, healthcare, and higher education. As chief operating officer of a rural Texas hospital, he guided the team to win the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. Later, as Vice Chancellor for Leader and Culture Development at the Texas Tech University System, he disrupted traditional approaches by embedding values-based leadership into institutional strategy, aligning ethics with long-term vision and preparing leaders of character for the future. Today, as founder and president of Second Mountain Coaching, Steve partners with organizations across industries to align culture, strategy, and leadership so they can thrive responsibly in the face of complex challenges. His expertise lies in driving constructive disruption that becomes a force multiplier for clarity, purpose, and resilience. Beyond his professional work, Steve finds his deepest purpose in family, his wife of 40 years, Kelly, their two daughters, two sons-in-law, and four grandchildren. Their love grounds his belief that leadership at its core is about stewardship and responsibility to others. It's great to have you on the podcast, Steve.
SPEAKER_03I love this series. I've loved listening to the other leaders and learning from them. Thanks for letting me participate.
SPEAKER_02As we start, can you give us a little bit of a background on your leadership journey?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you bet. I think that like all journeys, uh you know, there's a there's a beginning and perhaps uh an end, the the same end that we all will have, right? So what are we going to do until we're no longer uh on this earth? Uh that we have a common destination. Our journeys may vary. Uh and it's I think it's important to try to figure out our own origin story, especially for those of us who aspire to uh lead people, lead organizations. Well, it's good to delve into that. So a lot of my background in that came early on from my paternal grandfather, my paternal grandmother, who gave me a sense of identity that I could be as I could be what I would become based on the things that I would do, the habits that I would develop, the things that I would do, the ability to listen, the ability to learn, the ability to remember I'm not special and be humble. And uh and so those traits started on started early. And then, as you mentioned uh in the opening with my bio, uh being able to go to the United States Military Academy, which was a values-based organization, and then continued that on through the Army and through, I guess I'm now as an entrepreneur, I'm in my sixth career uh uh during uh 46-year period. So I think that it's a journey. And it's about learning every step of the way and then being able to find people to share that with, to learn from others, and then figure out who we can share things with that it might benefit them.
SPEAKER_02Knowing your why is powerful. Uh it's a it's a Polaris, it's a guiding star for for the future. And I I I love that that for you started very early on. And it's very evident that that's been your pursuit is that is that pouring into others. And we're I'd love to uh dive more into that a little bit here um as as we go on. But I am I am fascinated about your journey and and you mentioned the uh your time at West Point. What you didn't say is your background is isn't as an Army Ranger, and I I'd love to know how that experience shaped the person and leader that you are today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's it's interesting, Lane, that most people when they look at my military background, it's the Army Ranger that that sticks out for them because there's some mystique about uh special operations, about Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and the equivalent in the other branches of service. I I want to try to give you three perspectives as an Army Ranger. Uh, one, the impact on the individual, on me, the impact on what it would mean for me throughout my career uh for teams. So individual teams. And then there's a paradox that exists that most people don't understand that I want to try to explain from my perspective, from a bigger picture perspective of what that paradox is. So the individual, the team, and then this unit level paradox that exists. So as an individual, uh, anytime you meet someone who is an Army Ranger, they are a four-time volunteer in uh in modern rangers. The first is they volunteered to join the military. They volunteered to join the Army. We're an all-volunteer force since 1974. The second is they volunteer to go to airborne school and learn how to jump out of airplanes, which is a requirement of rangers. The third, they volunteer for uh 58 to 70, my my course was 72 days, uh, but about a 58-day course. They volunteer to go to ranger school. There's a high washout rate of 50 to 60 percent that don't make it through. They volunteer for that. And then having made all that, some of those, not all, will volunteer to go to a ranger unit, and then they'll be uh in the um 75th Ranger Regiment. I was in the 1st Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment. So four times as a volunteer. What does that mean? Well, when we volunteer for something, we are assuming responsibility. So when it I want to try to connect my background to values since that's the work that you and I do on values-based culture. So I think that that it just deepened whatever was inside me that that leaned towards accountability and responsibility. It was emphasized in the in my individual development as an Army Ranger. I had volunteered, therefore, I willingly assumed responsibility that not everybody takes on. The second part is the team piece, and that is when we get into ranger school, we are paired with someone else, our ranger buddy, and we become jointly responsible for each other. Anything that happened, and when I was in, uh fortunately now we have women rangers, not a lot, but we have some. When I was in, it was all male. So if I phrase it with male, it's because that was my reality in 1978 when I went to ranger school. So I was paired with my ranger buddy. He and I were responsible for each other. We got graded together. There were certain things. Uh, we had to make it through the same difficult obstacles together. So if one fell, the other at one point P. Dash was my ranger buddy. He broke his collarbone and hand-to-hand training. I carried his all, I took all the weight out of his rucksack and I carried it in mine so that he could make it. Not real bright. We should have gotten him medical help when he needed it, but for a while we were just trying to gut it out, and neither one of us wanted to drop out of ranger school or or fail out. So, you know, but we would carry each other. And you learn this incredible loyalty. So, another value that is important is loyalty to another person and being able to do that. It deepened the accountability for each other, and we took ownership for each other. So, you know, you start seeing how this deepens a values perspective. Okay, so the individual, the four-time volunteer and responsibility, the team working with others and loyalty and accountability, mutual ownership of things, that became really important. But then here's the paradox. And this is what even people in the Army don't quite understand altogether. Because the Rangers are an elite force, uh, mistakes aren't tolerated. So if somebody had uh in a ranger unit, if there was a soldier that made a mistake, wrote a hot check, had a problem at home with their spouse, something else that would happen, rather than helping them deal with the challenges that they were facing, we just got rid of the ranger. They were just eliminated. They went back to the regular army, they didn't stay in a ranger unit. So you had to be um have a pristinely clean record. You had to be able to almost be flawless in everything that we did, because we knew that if we made a mistake, if we failed, somebody was going to get hurt or killed. We had to make sure that that we had the people on board that were the best of the best, the elite of the elite, and there was a long line of people to take any of our places. If something happened, there were a lot of people that wanted our place. The paradox is the best of times is that we're in a unit of incredibly individually skilled elite people that we could count on, that trust was high, we had each other's back, everybody had loyalty, accountability, ownership, and trust. And we knew we had each other. And being in that was like the best environment we could be in. On the other hand, for leader development, not so good. Because instead of helping somebody in teaching our young leaders how to help somebody junior to get through tough challenges, they didn't learn that. They just got rid of them. That's not something that transfers well in later life. Much better to understand how failure serves us well and how learning those lessons can make somebody stronger in their future. Now, it may have changed. It's been a long time since I was uh in the ranger regiment, but back when I was there in the 80s, 70s, 80s, that's when um that was prevalent. And the lesson I learned was we've got to be better than that. We've got to be able to help people work through their challenges, and they'll be better for it. And we will teach our leaders how to lead people that are imperfect because we're imperfect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's fascinating. I appreciate that insight. Uh obviously the the the lessons you learn from your time in Ranger School, the mutual accountability and support, the ownership, the loyalty. Um, but the but the challenge of overcoming failure, maybe not being a part of that dynamic. And as you well know, in our work working with leaders across the universities that we work with in the system, that fear of failure, that overcoming failure, that resilience or grit really is a day-to-day uh challenge and opportunity for everyone. In fact, I'll be doing a three-part webinar this summer on on grit and resilience, just because it's something that like everybody that I'm I wrestle with in how to how to be more and more resilient, how to overcome, how to learn and grow from failure. Um but yeah, it's it's uh it's a it's a key life uh skill that uh that we all need to grow on to continue to grow in. Moving to your roles at Texas Tech, which you had had a few, um, you helped build leader development across an entire university system. What problem were you trying to solve in that effort?
SPEAKER_03Lane, you're a reader, you've got a lot of books around you, you're surrounded by them. You can look around my office and I am as well. So I'm gonna answer your question with the title of a book. What problem was I trying to solve? The problem is uh a book uh the title of a book written in 1969. By the way, it's not a great book, don't go read it. Rather, Google the title and you'll understand everything you need to know about the Peter principle. So, what is it? What problem was I trying to solve? If you look up the Peter principle, you'll see that it's loosely defined as the tendency for hierarchical organizations like higher ed, like healthcare. And we're at the intersection with our five universities in the Texas Tech system, we're at the intersection of healthcare and higher ed, arguably the two of the most dysfunctional industries in America. There's a tendency, according to the Peter principle, of hierarchical organizations like healthcare and higher education to promote people to their highest level of incompetence. So, what do we mean by that? And of course, you've worked in government agencies where sometimes there's a tendency of that as well. And that is that we take our very best frontline team members who have become technical experts at their work and they're so good at it, whether it's a professor or a nurse or someone in USAID, right? We take somebody who's really good, and then we have a supervisory role come open. So we select them for it because their peers are champions of theirs. They're able to influence others. We've seen their great work and we've seen how people naturally follow them, so we promote them. Great. They do well in that first supervisory role, normally, and then we keep going, and then there's a managerial role and a director and a senior director, and we and then, depending on the organization, a vice president or uh, you know, a C-suite position. This can go all the way through a career that we continue to promote people based on their performance, but we're not doing anything to develop their ability to lead others. Organizations tend to do that. They didn't always do that. There used to be in-house development programs in the 50s and in the 60s, but then as people started to move organizations, some leaders would say, Why would I invest in them? They're just going to leave anyway. So they stopped internal development. And I believe that that's a real problem. What happens is, and I'll give you a personal example of in the nursing role where we had a nurse when I was a hospital administrator, and we promoted this nurse, manager, director, all those levels up into the C-suite. And then she failed miserably in that position because she couldn't lead the hard, she couldn't deal with the hard people issues that she faced among her directors. And so, because of that failure, we ended up firing her because there was no other place we could move her. She had already climbed to the top.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03We were in a small town. There was no place for her to go. We forced her to move her family. I felt horrible. I felt like we were culpable. It was the right thing to do to move her off the bus. But the organization was culpable because we didn't have a leader development program. So the problem that I've been trying to solve in my career is the Peter principle. Instead of promoting people to their highest level of incompetence, let's give them leader competencies along the way and train them for their next role before we promote them. That was the impetus of creating the leader development program in the Texas Tech University system.
SPEAKER_02Fascinating. And you're right. I saw that in in my role with the federal government. And it's it's uh it's endemic, I think, to any large bureaucracy, any large organization. But I love that that idea of not not even necessarily just in time training when someone's being promoted at last level where they're gonna feel incompetent or act incompetently, but to do it along the way. And I think that's being played out in some of the work that uh our office is doing at Angelo State, Midwestern State, and and and uh the medical school. So um it's a great legacy.
SPEAKER_03Well, may I uh add one anecdote to this just to emphasize. Shortly after coming on board in 2018, um, I was meeting with one of our deans, and uh when I was talking about leader development and the things that we could do to support that particular organization, the dean said, Steve, we uh don't have a lot of senior leader roles open. Why would I invest in somebody and not have a position to promote them to? So why would I invest in somebody when they're likely, once we we develop them, they're likely to leave. And my response was I'm not concerned about developing people and they leave. I'm much more concerned about not developing people and they stay. There are a lot of things we can do with people that we've developed. It doesn't have to be vertical promotion. We can give them more responsibility, we can help them find other things to do, we can take care of their careers, and if they leave, if we've done our jobs well, they will go on and do great things and they'll be strong advocates for us.
SPEAKER_02Right. That's great. I've got a few uh questions under some topics. Uh, and so the the we're gonna move into a topic of leadership philosophy and principles. So, as we've talked about, you've invested a lot of your career on developing and fostering values-based culture. What does that look like in daily behavior?
SPEAKER_03So you said you wanted this under a category of philosophy and principles. So I'll get just a uh a bit philosophical in my response to you by saying that I work on an assumption that every individual has values and that those values aren't given to them by their organization. And while we work hard, so it may sound ironical that as a team, your office focuses on helping organizations identify and codify their core values. That's not really it. It's not the core values of the organization, it's actually the shared values of the people in the organization.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03That's what we codified. So I work on the assumption that every individual has their own values that they they bring to us. When we hire somebody, we get them with their values. So all we ever tried to codify was we tried to codify what are the values that are common amount among all the people in the organization, the ones we share. So that if we could emphasize that, we could emphasize and encourage everybody to come to work with the being the best version of themselves and understand that we share common core values with each other, but it may not be comprehensive. There are other values. You and I come from different faith traditions, for example. So that influences our value set. We're not talking about the differences between how we approach things. We're talking about what we have in common. Let's codify that. So one thing is that we assume that. We assume every individual has values. The second thing we assume is that every organization has a culture. It just may not be the culture they want.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So what is culture? Well, culture is the collect, and we got this from Ann Rhodes in her book, Built on Values, that's on your bookshelf. And uh on page 15 of that book, she talks about the relationship between leaders and performance. But she says that leaders drive values not by naming them, but by creating the environment that allows all of us to live our best version of ourselves, to live our own values. What do values drive? Values drive how we act, our behaviors, how we treat each other. And that defines our culture. So it's our collective behaviors, how we treat each other that defines our culture. If we don't like the way we're treating each other, then maybe we have a culture issue, and we should go back to looking at the desired behaviors of the group, and let's re-emphasize those behaviors and find a way to hold each other accountable, hold ourselves accountable to those specific behaviors. So the daily activities of a values-based culture have to do with each individual saying, I really want to behave well today. When I don't, I want you to hold me accountable. I'm going to try to hold myself accountable first, but if I don't and I make a mistake, which I will, then Lane, please call me out on it. I'm looking to you to be, I'm going to refer back to something earlier. I want you to be my Ranger buddy. I want you to be the one that helps me wake up because you know what's in my heart. You know I want to be good. Hey, just remind me, and I can self correct. So this mutual accountability that happens, that's the daily work of a values based culture. But I left one critical point out. And it only works if the senior leader of the organization is committed to this. I won't work for an organization unless the senior leader has a strong desire to have a values-based culture. Otherwise, through their actions, not their intent, through their actions, they undermine it. I can expand on that. I don't think I have to, but uh the point is senior leaders must be the first one to raise their hand and say, I'm gonna live our our values-based culture. I'm gonna model that. I'm going to I want people to hold me accountable first.
SPEAKER_02Well that that that's profound, and and that's uh I 100% concur that in my experience, like you, I've had several different careers from law to development to to this work to others. Um so much of an organization reflects its leader. A leader has such vast uh impact on the operations, on the culture, on the feel of an organization. And so um it's something that you've been great about coaching some of my former USAID colleagues when they're conducting their job hunts. Identify your own values that are important to you. And when you're out there looking, look for companies that carry those same values and and pursue those. Uh and and great advice for for my former colleagues, for anybody listening uh who really is drawn and wants to be a part of a values-based culture if they're not in that position right at this point.
SPEAKER_03Hey, I'm gonna throw this out there, Lane, for any of your listeners who want help with this, I will willingly help them to be able to do that. They can contact me, and I am I am happy to help them on their individual journey to find that. Because I you and I share a vision of a better world, a world with leaders of character. And it's miserable to be misaligned and to be in the wrong organization. It's uh it's so refreshing. I see that with you. I see, I see how your spirit has just taken off and grown. You came from a great organization, but senior leaders didn't support you being you, they do now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. And uh for for listeners, Steve's authentic when he's saying he will help. Um he he's been a great help to a lot of my former colleagues without compensation, just out of concern and care for other people. And and uh so uh take him up on the offer if you're in that position and you're looking for the next journey and and and would like some guidance from someone with his experience, he he's uh he's a terrific help. You've written in other places uh about the dichotomy between knowledge hoarders and knowledge sharers. Explain the difference and and why the distinction is so critical.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, this one I think I can do fairly briefly, which is unusual for me. Okay. There's a phrase knowledge is power. I've come to understand my life experiences have informed me that there are two categories of that. Knowledge is power, therefore, if I can keep you in the dark and I'm the one who holds on to the knowledge, hoards the knowledge, then I can keep my power over you.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03I think it's short-lived, it's not the kind of organization I don't want to work with people like that, but there are people like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But then there's the other person who believes that knowledge is power only when it's shared. They're the wiki leaders, if you will, right? They willingly, they get so excited about learning something new and seeing how it can apply to make us better that they share it willingly and openly without compensation. They just share it. Not and when I say compensation, I don't mean financial. I mean not worried about what that is going to do for them, but rather look at how we can lift people up. Look how how we can multiply other people by sharing knowledge with them and helping them be better. We're all better. We all get better. That's what I meant.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's great. It's like an abundance mindset that there's enough good out there for everyone. We don't need to I I experienced this when I worked for the nonprofit uh for a few years in in Africa, that our the leader of our organization, visionary leader, compelling leader, had you know, nonprofits are often competing for the same dollars, donors, especially in these faith-based organizations. And there very easily could be this sense of competition that we can't share our context, we can't share too much because others may horn in on our source of funding. But his mindset was we're gonna be wide open, you know, we're we're gonna trust in what we're doing, that there's enough out there that we can then be open and transparent and think of this abundance mindset. And it was freeing for all of us in the organization not to take on consciously or subconsciously this con this uh uh competition mindset. But but knowledge has the same role that when you've got a leader that is willing to share, that is empowering and it does permeate the organization.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and uh doubtful that your listeners are not aware of what you mean by abundance mindset, but if abundance versus scarcity, right? Instead of trying to fight to get a bigger uh piece of the pie by hoarding knowledge, right? It's understanding I don't need a bigger piece of the pie. We just need the pie bigger. So if we work together, we can make a bigger pie. And we lift, you know, high tide lifts all boats, whatever uh analogy we want to use. So it's abundance versus scarcity, scarcity, or it's growth versus fixed mindset, as Carol Dweck would say. Uh, how do we continue to grow? And you know, I'm I'm curious about what's next, and I think the only way we can figure that out is to grow.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Absolutely. We're gonna shift to our next topic of of building culture at scale. Most organizations say they value culture, but very few actually live it out or change it. What did you do differently to change the culture of the organizations that you worked for?
SPEAKER_03Three three things. One I've mentioned, and that is partner with the senior leader of the organization, whether that's a president, CEO, uh, chancellor, partner with the senior leader, you know, deans, whoever whatever whatever size group you're in, but partner with that senior leader and understand their vision and help them to be able to shape their culture vision for the organization. So it starts with the person at the top. And sometimes they haven't done that. That's okay. Then just ask them, be curious, ask them questions. Uh help them understand that culture will drive performance faster than skill set. We can train skills, we can develop leaders, but we have to hire culture. And so we've got to be able to find the people that that share those values that we bring that in. So the first thing we start with the person at the top, we try to get her or him to be able to uh to uh craft their shape their vision of what they want the culture to look like. Then the second part is to set up a methodology of how are we going to get to that culture. So it's it's actually what coaches do, and that is to understand the the gap between where we are today and where we want to be at some point in the future. So with the Office of Leader in Culture Development, when we work with organizations, what we would do is, and Shelby Jolly was a master at this of being able to have a short survey that she could have every member of the organization uh complete, which basically said, How would what words would you use to describe our current culture? What words would you use to describe your personal core values? I think that's the first question, personal core values. What words would you use to describe our current culture? And then what words would you use to describe our ideal culture? And by analyzing that, even putting it in a word cloud, it was, it became clear of where the gap was between where we are and where we want to be. We then combine that with the vision of the senior leader who says, look, I really want us to have a culture that looks like this. We said, well, here's what our people say about where we are today and where we want to be. And then it's just a matter of then bringing the organization along. And so that's where we would have events uh and we would have, you know, the values summit is what we called them, where we would bring as many, ideally bring 100% of the people that are in the organization into one place at one time. That's not always practical. You know, it's not practical in a very large organization or in an organization. I have a private client who's a bank. It's not, unless it's a bank holiday, we can't bring everybody in. So there are times when that's just not practical. Then we do samplings of having people. So I'll use the uh Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center as an example. In May 2nd and 3rd of 2018, when we did the value summit, we had 103 people there. Well, it was a, you know, we we had over 5,000 people in the organization. When you looked at students, faculty, staff, uh, we had clinics to run, we had prisons to run, where we provided health care at uh over 20 prisons across Texas. So what we did was we had 103 people. They did a uh we they came up with the the values that they wanted to use, the values and behaviors to shape the culture that they wanted, the ideal culture, that then President Ted Mitchell and Lori Rice Fearman, who was a dean and provost at the time, and then and then became the president, that they we had their vision. We brought every we brought 103 people together, we got a draft of what the values and behaviors were, but then we held 91 town hall meetings over the next three months so that everybody, all 5,000 people would have the ability to give their input. Every student, every faculty member, every staff member, regardless of the locations, the six university locations, and the 21, I think, 21 prisons at the time. Uh so we went to every team and uh got input. So patience. Not everybody's gonna come on board at the same time. And you're gonna have some people that come on board quickly, and you're gonna have other people that that come on board more slowly, and some people that are skeptical, and some people who are cynical and never come on board. Uh, understand that's the reality. But by doing that, we can scale and we can start with a vision. We can get the people who are on board through it through a process and a methodology, we can bring that together, and we can then with daily accountability, uh, we can integrate it into processes, how we hire, how we promote, how we develop. Uh, in every leader development program, it's about the values. Every meeting we have, we've got values posted in the rooms where we make decisions so that somebody can say, How do our values inform what decision we're going to make?
SPEAKER_02That word accountability in my mind is vital. And I think, you know, you and I talked about this in one of our my early interviews or our early time together, is that I have been a part of, I'm sure a lot of listeners have been a part of, organizations that have invest time, maybe not as much time as the Health Sciences Center, but in developing a clear mission, vision, and values. And it's tight and it's clear and it's compelling, but then it goes on a wall and it's artwork. And that's it, that's the last of it. It becomes background noise, if you will. But what's but the accountability, how how does that come in practically? How do you once if you want to have a values-based organization, you've gone through the long work of identifying those common values, but how do you breathe it to life?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, thank thanks for asking that. I mean, because accountability is one of the top three topics that I get asked the most in my now private career as uh as an executive coach and doing leader development workshops. Accountability is one of the top three topics, along with trust and communication. So I want to use Jason Weber's model, a model I learned from Jason to explain this. And what I would ask, and Lane, if you'll do this, then maybe your listeners would do it as well. It would be great if you had a copy, any copy of values, anybody's, you know, any organization's values where you could kind of look at it, but because the question is, how do we stay accountable to that? But here's what I'd like for you to do on a blank piece of paper, uh, just draw a vertical line down the middle of the paper. And then on the left side, write these three words one on top of each other. On top, put ownership, underneath it, accountability, underneath that responsibility. So on the left, you've got ownership, accountability, and responsibility. Three words that get interchanged a lot. It's hard for people to talk about accountability without somehow defining it with responsibility and vice versa. And it frankly, it gets a little confusing. So I think if we want to understand what accountability is, let's look at the opposite of it. So you've got ownership, accountability, and responsibility on the left-hand side. On the right hand side, across from ownership, put blame. And underneath that, across from accountability, put excuses. And underneath that, across from responsibility, is denial. So sometimes the way to understand a word is understand the opposite of the word.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Peel the banana from a different direction. So if we use that, then if I'm making excuses, I'm not holding myself accountable. Oh, but you don't understand. The reason I did that was this and this and that. Well, you know, what are the behaviors that we've agreed upon that are going to be our desired behaviors that drive our culture? No excuses. Do that. So again, going back to the ranger story, it actually requires having a ranger buddy, if you will. So that's not a practical term in our world. So why don't we just call them an accountability partner? And the question is, who is your accountability partner? Who do you trust so highly that you love so much that you know that she will be the first to step up and hold you accountable when let me phrase it first person. Who do I love so much? Who loves me so much, that cares about me deeply, that won't allow me to not live my best me? Who's my accountability partner? If I know that I've got somebody out there that I can depend on for that, I'm actually more likely to hold myself accountable. It's kind of like working out. If I know that I've got a workout partner, then even though I don't want to get up at five in the morning and go meet them to work out, they're gonna be there, I'm gonna be there. Right? I think it's the same mindset.
SPEAKER_02Sure. That's great. Yeah, the line of choice model that Jason uses really is powerful. That that line of choice between ownership, responsibility, and blame, denial, that type of thing. And it's something that uh it resonates with people because everybody's been on both sides of that, and everybody's been in organizations that tend to teeter one way or the other. Um but owning your individual role in in those decisions in an organization either way, whether you respond positively or negatively, is is infectious. And so the more that we individually can respond with ownership, responsibility, uh, accountability that permits others to do the same. I am gonna deviate a little bit from from the the questions that I shared with you on this, but um one of the things one of the one of the amazing things, just one of the amazing things about uh about you, Steve, is your amazing ability to connect with people. And the the illustration I have in my mind is we overlapped a week. My first week was your last week before you retired. We drove around to some of the different campuses all over West Texas, and everywhere we went, whether it be stopping at a rest stop or a restaurant or one of the universities, you was had a knack for connecting with people, whether it be the the the one dollar bills that you would carry that would share or two dollar bills, I'm sorry, that you would share with people and and their light, their faces would just light up at a at a restaurant. You know, we'd stop at and you'd say, Here, have a two dollar bill, and you'd talk about where it was made, and and people would just like they're initially they were they were put off, like, what is this about? But the more they saw your genuine nature in it, it it made their day. So my question is is that ability to connect, that desire to to bring, to lighten people's day, is that something that was natural to you or something that you had to work at? And I just love to know some insight into that aspect of you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so nature versus nurture or or leader's mate or born or those kinds of things. And even this question, and I'm not putting down the question because I'm gonna answer it directly, but I I don't think it matters. I think the question is moot only from this perspective, and that is no matter where I began, you know, no matter what my birthright was, if I'm not continuing to sharpen my saw, as Steve Norcovey said, then I'm failing as a leader anyway. I've got to continue to grow, I've got to continue to get better. So, where did it come from? I'm gonna give you a few things. Let me give you three. My I told you about my paternal grandfather, my father's father, and my father were both very, very good at interacting with people. And so, as a young kid, uh I would be at their knees and watching them interact, and they would interact, and they taught me to shake hands and make eye contact and things that we a lot of us do with our kids, but they did, but then it then I just noticed how they use names, and I thought, wow, that's really good. I want to, I want to be able to do that. Then when I was old enough and I started reading, I read a book that is 90 years old now. I think it was 1936, is when uh Dell Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. Uh I I didn't read it when it first came out, but I read it uh in later years. And what Carnegie said is that the most important thing we can ever say to somebody is their own first name. People who know me know that I use people's first names. I don't use their titles. And uh I do it not out of a lack of respect for the title they've earned, but rather for a deeper respect that their parents gave them a name that had meaning. And so I'm trying to connect with that. And so I really try to learn people's names, but it is not magic. I don't have an ability that you don't have, or I don't have any hidden ability that that isn't, doesn't exist in every person listening to this. We can all learn how to do it. It it's because we will learn what we care about. There are tricks to learning people's first names, it's not magic. I've shown you some. I walk in a room, and if I'm in a meeting, I map out the room. It doesn't matter if it's theater style or hollow square or a line of chairs. I get to the room early and I map out the room, and it doesn't matter if I'm reading something or I'm participating, I will do this, and then I start filling in. I try to make a tick mark for or a hash mark for every seat in the room, and then I spend time trying to fill in the names of people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I can often somebody asked me yesterday, they brought somebody up and I said and they said, Do you remember so-and-so? And I said, I remember where she was sitting uh during the value summit that we did in January of 2024.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_03She was sitting at the back left table, she was over on the left-hand side because I remembered the circle diagram that I had for that circle table for that round table, and I remember where she was sitting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So Carol was sitting there. And um, you know, we can we've got the ability. So the point is on connecting to people, it's that saying that's a people don't care what you know they until they know that you care. And uh that's probably one of the top lessons of a leader.
SPEAKER_02Well it it's uh it's I'm starting to say a remarkable gift, but it's not a gift. It is something that that can require that requires intentionality. And if you if you value it, like you've said, if you value it, you will do it. Um and and so I think people often I've often had to make excuses. Well, I'm just not good at remembering names, but really if we if we if we place a great value on that, we will learn it and we will become better at it, and it does convey respect and that you see people. And so I really value that about you.
SPEAKER_03Okay, I'm gonna tell you a story. Okay. So my last assignment in the Army, I was stationed in Germany, and Kelly and our two daughters were with us, and we lived in a small German village, and we were the only English speakers in the village. So we had to learn to speak German. Our kids' babysitters spoke German. You know, we if we wanted to eat, if we wanted to buy anything, we had to we had to do it in German. Uh, fast forward in later years, we moved to the German Texas Hill Country, to the German town of Fredericksburg, where there were still families whose ancestors uh had come from Fredericksburg. I think your wife and family uh I think there's a girl's trip to Fredericksburg this weekend. They'll notice that there's some people who still speak German here. And it used to be that the signs in the shop windows were in German. So I had a habit of walking downtown. We lived a couple blocks from Main Street, and I would go into shops, and my favorite shop was a bakery that was owned by a woman, and Mrs. Deets uh would be very patient with my poor German, and we would have conversations, and she would correct my German, and uh, but but she would allow me to go back and forth. And so one day I asked her if she could make something in the bakery that we'd had in Bavaria where we lived. And and she said in German, she said, we don't make that. She said that in German. We don't make that, and then she added uh a word, yet, we don't make that yet. And I thought, I don't know the German word yet. I don't know that word. So I said, the heist yet auf English. How do you say yet in English? And she looked at me like I had stupid on my forehead, which I probably did. And she said, it is English. And so then I rewound what she said, and she said, We don't make that yet. And I thought, wow, what a powerful word. We I don't, you know, I'm not good at first names yet. Yet is a powerful word. It gives us permission to do something that we cannot yet do. And so if we just tack that on the next time our tendency is to say, I don't do that, or I can't do that, just add the word yet. Give yourself permission to grow. Go back to the abundance mindset, the growth mindset. Give yourself permission to do something in the future that you don't do yet.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's great, Steve. That's profound. I appreciate that. Moving to speed round as we as we near the end of our episode here, who's a leader that you admire the most?
SPEAKER_03I I have had the opportunity in a career to work with some phenomenal leaders. And um having listened to your other podcast, knowing you were going to ask me this, uh, I should have an answer right on the tip of my tongue. But the thing that probably occurs to me is to go more general in my answer, especially given uh what the date is today and what we've experienced in this past week. Who's the leader I admire most? Every mother. I don't know how they are born with six arms, how they can do as much as they do. Uh, I would say that for mothers who are at home raising kids and to be able to do all that they do, for working mothers who try to balance so many things in their lives. I don't have the ability to completely understand or empathize with how women leaders and mothers in the same person can do everything that they do. I don't have the ability to empathize. I can only admire.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03And I see that in our two daughters. I saw it in Kelly throughout a 30-year career as a dental hygienist and raising our kids. I see that with our daughter who's a surgeon. I see it with our daughter who's uh about to launch a rocket at Cape Canaveral uh with satellites for Apple. I I don't know how they do it. I admire mothers. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Can't argue with that. What's one book that has shaped you? Yeah. I know you've mentioned a few, but but um the hard questions.
SPEAKER_03This is supposed to be the speed round, right? I can't give you one book, but I'll give you two. All right. So Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. Powerful. Uh, where on page 66 of the book, Victor Frankel says something. I'm not going to quote this exactly, but uh we've included it with values coins. So if anybody has a values coin, they may have this quote, but it says something that the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in any given situation. It was the one thing that Victor Frankel in um in Auschwitz understood that the Nazis could take everything away, they could take so many things away, but could not take away the freedom to choose one's attitude, no matter what the situation. So I can't choose how somebody treats me, I can choose my response. The second book goes with this, and the reason I'm I have to include um Edie Eager's book, The Choice, Edith, Dr. Edith Eager, E-G-E-R, she died two weeks ago, two weeks ago today, at the age of 98. We brought her to Lubbock, we brought her to Fort We brought her a lot of places to speak. She's somebody I admire greatly. She was a friend and contemporary of Victor Frankel, even though she was younger. They were both in Auschwitz at the same time. She was a young girl, he was, he already had kids. And uh she danced with him at his 90th birthday. Her book, The Choice, is based on the quote from Victor Frankl. We have a choice. We have a choice in how we respond to stimuli in our environment, which includes how people behave. Just because somebody has behaved in a way I don't like doesn't mean I have to respond that way. I have the freedom to choose. I have the freedom to forgive. I have the freedom to hold myself accountable even if somebody else isn't holding them self accountable.
SPEAKER_02I uh that's fantastic. I've read Man's Search for Meaning, I have not read the choice, but I look forward to because that is that's that is a fundamental decision in life that can change everything. If we truly believe that we can respond to a situation that may be negative or challenging or life and death, but with a positive attitude or with finding something to carry on, that's a life-changing uh mindset, that's a life-changing habit. Um I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Uh the day after Edie died, I posted something on LinkedIn, and if anybody sees it, uh, there's a photograph of Edie in it, and Edie's holding up a baby. That's our set uh at the time, uh our seven-month-old grandson. He's now eight years old. But uh, when he was seven months old, we took Milo to meet uh Edie Eager at her home in La Jolla, California. So that's uh that's a photograph I took.
SPEAKER_02That's great.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Last question to speedrun. What are you still trying to learn?
SPEAKER_03I'm gonna give you something real that uh I'm really wrestling with. There was a rabbi named Harold Kushner who wrote a book a lot of people knew about um when bad things happen to good people. Trying to explain like the death of a child or or uh other things that happen, or the Holocaust, or or or Gaza, or whatever it is that we're trying to understand, you know, what happens when bad things happen to good people? That's not it. What I'm trying is to figure out is the opposite. What happens with somebody who I think is generally a bad person? What do I do when a bad person does something really good? I think the lesson from both sides of that is to not be judgmental, be curious, not judgmental. Walt Woodman's quote. And that is to understand that while there may be people who are truly evil, we've alluded to that, most people are complicated. We do good things, we do bad things, we do things that are effective, we do things that aren't effective. And for me, what I'm trying to learn is to, I'm trying to learn how to stop labeling people, that I like them or I don't like them, that they're good or that they're bad or that they're evil or they're great. Because the truth is, is even if if I put any, ascribe any label to somebody, I don't see them all the time. I don't know everything. I've got these authors of these books behind me, and I really like the lessons from the books, but I don't know if they were good in all they did in their life.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03I don't want to cancel anybody. I want to learn what people do that are effective, and I want to grow from what I can learn. I want to learn what they did that wasn't effective, and I want to grow from not doing those things.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03And I'm I'm still a work in progress.
SPEAKER_02That's great. I think I think we all are. I appreciate that. Any last bits of advice you'd like to share with listeners?
SPEAKER_03Be humble, be curious, and be kind.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03That that will typically work.
SPEAKER_02Steve, it's been it's been great to talk with you. And and I'm I'm appreciate all that you've done for me personally and for the ways that you've impacted people across the Texas Tech University system. Uh, thank you for taking the time today to talk with me. It really has been a pleasure, and I think it'll be uh there's a lot in here that are it's gonna be really useful for people um who are listening.
SPEAKER_03I mean thank you. And you told me we only had a week of overlap. Gee whiz, that was a deep week because I remember so much from you that I learned. So thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to be able to uh be on your podcast with you.
SPEAKER_02My pleasure. Thank you for joining me on the Leader Fast Lane, listeners. If today's conversation sparked a moment of reflection or a lane change in how you think about leadership, take a minute to share this episode with someone you lead or learn from. You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep leading with purpose, integrity, and clarity, especially when it's hard.
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