In this podcast, your host Loree Draude, former Navy combat jet pilot with decades of experience leading teams in the Navy, and at Google, Facebook and Silicon Valley startups, and to stories about developing leaders and teams to reach peak performance. You’ll be inspired by World Class guests and learn strategies, tactics, the mindset and skill set needed. So you too, can develop supersonic leaders in teams. here’s your host, Loree droughty.

Loree 0:34
I’m delighted to welcome my dear friend Scotty Perkins to the supersonic leaders and teams podcast this week, Scotty and I met at a startup called credit, which then became pay near me and is now called handle financial. Scotty was the fourth employee and I was the seventh. So we got to experience the excitement and challenges of a high growth startup. We both eventually moved on to larger companies. Scotty is now the senior vice president of product innovation for quisitive, where he is the head of their ledger pay product company. In this podcast, we had a great discussion about the leadership principles he learned from his high school football coach, Kevin Carroll, and how those principles influenced him, as he assumed leadership positions in companies, including FedEx and Motorola. So excited to talk with you, you know, it’s been my God. Have we known each other for 11 years? That’s when we first started working together, right? Yeah. And I just remember, when I first joined pay near me back then it was quite it. And I think I got an email from you. I had not met you in person yet. And your profile photo, you had these like, badass workout, you know, like, Terminator sunglasses in your profile photo and a shaved head and like this athletic jacket, I’m like, Oh, my God, he’s kind of scary. And then I got to know you. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh, you’re just like, one of the nicest.

Scotty Perkins 2:01
Were you wrong? Yeah.

Loree 2:06
And I mean, I learned so much from you, when we work together, pay near me, and you know about leadership and about working together as a team, and making some tough decisions and all those things. And so I’m really glad to welcome you to the podcast today.

Scotty Perkins 2:19
Likewise,

Loree 2:20
I like to ask my guests a question about their childhood. Because, you know, obviously, those are formative years. And so I’m curious if you ever had an experience as a child about influencing others, like what was the first time you realize that you could lead other people or that you might be able to inspire other people to do something that was important to you?

Scotty Perkins 2:41
I think probably the best answer I can give you is that a lot of my childhood experiences were characterized by both not seeing a lot of leadership around and also being individually frustrated with not being able to influence people nearly the way that I wanted to. So I would be completely off base if I represented that I was able to do anywhere near the level of leadership that I wanted to. And a lot of the things that if I do leadership Well, at all, it’s it’s in response to things that I learned much later, even after I had been in the workforce for 10 plus years. So a lot of those learnings have been applied even in the last 10 probably have been the most important ones, going through business school and learning some of those things, from an organizational behaviors standpoint, from a book perspective, but also just experientially seeing what’s worked over the last 10 to 15 years and what hasn’t, and gotten exposure to more senior leaders on a more direct basis and, and applying some of the things that I observed and appreciated about them. So you can certainly tell some specific stories, there is actually had the opportunity to identify some learnings that I actually did learn and didn’t realize when I was in high school. So I wrote a piece on medium about this, which you can choose to make available if you want.

Loree 4:09
Yeah, it was just the one about your coach.

Scotty Perkins 4:11
Yeah. So yeah, I had a I had a high school football coach who was just really, really hard to play for. And he lead with this, in retrospect, I didn’t, in any way fully appreciate the quality of the leadership lessons I was getting at the time. And clearly, that’s something that’s a theme for all this probably, we didn’t know how good we had it at the time in terms of opportunities to apply learnings. But there are a lot of principles that we as a team, were able to learn from him. He’s in the process of retiring after 34 years. But there are a handful of principles which we can run through if you think that they’re interesting, that I wrote about there, which are pretty pivotal to how I apply my day to day experiences as much as I can.

Loree 4:56
Yeah, I’d love for you to share those.

Scotty Perkins 4:58
So a little bit of background, you know, Really, really small team of small people trying to play football in New Mexico, really, really spread out state. But here we had probably I think 17 or 18 players on the team, all of us way undersized, except for a couple of us. And you know, it’s a classic example of, of a coach trying to make the best of what he or she has with not a lot of talent. And the I learned a lot that the, by applying some of these principles which I can walk you through, there are ways to actually achieve more with less. And it was really interesting, as a lot of us as players at that time have come back. And as a lot of us an outsized number of us have experienced outsize success in our professional lives since then, realize just how many of these lessons we apply day to day. So I’ll just kind of walk through a handful of principles that we learned, and probably none of us completely appreciated the time, you know, the first one is that preparation beats talent. So you’re never going to have all the best athletes that you would want in any given scenario. But you can do your level best to make the athletes that you have as prepared as they are for game day as they can be. And ultimately, that’s the leader, right? Ultimately, the level of preparedness for any given team to face the challenge that they may be asked to meet is based on the is based on how much preparation that they have. So we worked as a team really hard. We there’s I don’t think there’s any of us as a as players that looked forward to practice. Well, yeah, we kept showing up for reasons that still I don’t fully understand. But, you know, we we worked really hard, you know, we were all in the best shape of our lives for being, you know, 1415 1617 year olds. And you know, that as the cliche goes, You can’t coach tall. But as leaders, we can make our teams work groups, extended teams, as prepared to play and as as learned about the problem and have to solve as they can be. So

Loree 7:19
do you feel like it took the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell

Scotty Perkins 7:22
recommends, it felt like the 10,000 hours, it wasn’t the 10,000 hours. And so, again, it’s one of those where the as a coach, he recognized that we were going to get slaughtered. If we, you know, figuratively, we were going to get slaughtered if we didn’t, if we weren’t able to, to keep up with the pace of the game. And because we were not going to be the best athletes. And I guess, you know, skipping to the end on this, this team of, you know, 18 or 20 of us however, it was, with 11 players on the field at any given time, we actually went undefeated. Wow. And we went undefeated, my junior year in high school, which we had absolutely no business doing. So that was one of those interesting applications. So that was Principle number one. Principle number one, preparations be tough. Principle number two is excellence is a habit. And the main theme around this principle was recognizing that you have a responsibility to bring the same game with you, no matter what the nature of your competition is. So the anecdote here is that, you know, let’s call it Week Five of this particular season, we want to underway game to play one of the most talented teams that we could have conceived to play against really, really good team, really physical, great athletes, just hit really, really hard. It’s one of those where, you know, you if you’re more of an academic type of football player you want you show up on field, like, Okay, this game is gonna suck. Yeah, this is gonna be hard. But again, we were prepared principle one, and we didn’t make a lot of mistakes. And we showed up, and by everyone’s accounting, we had no business winning, but we won that game, 14 to 13. We won by one point. Nice. So then just a couple of weeks in the season later, we go up, and we travel a long way. This is New Mexico. So we were on buses for hours and hours and hours. And we played another team that had nowhere near the level of skill and ability that this team that we had previously beaten had. And the end result was we won. We didn’t have a hard time winning, but we gave up a lot more points to this much less talented team than the one that we had previously beaten. And you know, a lot of us were still feeling pretty good about that. But our coach was really upset. He was really upset at the number of points that we had given up to this team. And the question that he was asking us was, do we really believe that this team that we played, which had substantially less talent and skill, had any business scoring more points on us than the team that we had previously beaten? Wow. Yeah. And it was a fair question, right? It’s not enough to show up and play just well enough to win. Although that’s important, right? You should play to your own level, and seek to increase your own level each week. And so the margin of victory should have been a lot bigger, the number of points that they scored, should have been a lot smaller.

Loree 10:30
So what you’re saying is that you all didn’t play to the level that you could have it was that because you assumed that the other team wouldn’t be good enough? Or did was it like an act of mercy for the other team? Like At what point?

Scotty Perkins 10:44
Like, yeah, as it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us, and it wouldn’t have occurred to our coach to allow us to allow the other team to score more points on us. So on the one hand, we probably wouldn’t have been so aggressive at scoring points of our own. But we should have shut out this team, there’s no way they should have scored on us. And they certainly never scored on us as if we had played anywhere near the level of quality of play, and level of focus and level of execution as we had in weeks prior. That was the key takeaway on it. And there’s actually a corollary to that principle, so that that principle of excellence is a habit, there’s a corollary to it, which is that you make your own luck.

Unknown Speaker 11:22
Nice. Yeah, I like that.

Scotty Perkins 11:25
And then this particular coach had some rules, right. And one rule that we had, which again, was felt just ridiculous at the time, but made a bunch of sense, in retrospect, was these little details, little details about preparedness. So none of us was allowed to take our helmets off. Unless they were like, specifically by permission while we were on the sideline. You might think, well, it’s New Mexico, it can be hot. Sometimes it’s cold. Yeah. What’s the basis of that? And he told us often and it in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. If I need you for this play, right now. And you can’t find your helmet. And you can’t get in the game in time, in order to actually snap the ball before we run out of time, and you get a delay a game. And we get a delay again, because you couldn’t find your helmet. Yeah, that won’t work. If we find you in that condition, you’re simply not going to play the rest of the game, because I know I can’t count on you.

Unknown Speaker 12:25
Laugh makes sense.

Scotty Perkins 12:26
So again, it’s one of those were interesting learning, right? didn’t fully appreciate. But then you fast forward to the people that we have now, I was looking around the room when we were all gathering for retirement celebration for this particular coach. And you kind of look at the nature of the fields that some of these players ultimately gravitated into. So we’re talking about Broadway actors. Wow. Military surgeons,

Unknown Speaker 12:55
aviators

Scotty Perkins 12:57
in our respective parts. Corporate litigation attorneys. Yeah, so imagine, you know, and teachers, academics, college professors. So it’s a matter of you look around and one of the key themes of these types of professions is that at the ready, need to be ready to go and gravitated into fields that had that as a requirement?

Loree 13:20
Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s such diverse fields, too. And broad diversity still, but

Scotty Perkins 13:25
that was an interesting stitch together theme of that. So that’s, that was another area that I observed about that. That’s Principle number two. Principle number three, and this has a corollary as well is do your job. Right? We’re all rely, we’re all relied upon on a team to do our job. And, you know, it’s, it’s not okay, as a leader to expect that you’re gonna have to mitigate every minute, people not doing their job. Right. Does it happen? Sure. Do you have to be prepared to do some of that? Sure. But is that the going in expectation, it shouldn’t be right, you should we should be preparing people to be able to do their jobs. And teams are generally constructed as cross functional things. Right? So in corporations, you have a finance team, you have an operations team, and you have a marketing team, and you have a sales team, and you have a technology team. And each of those teams needs to do its job. And the corollary to that is, is that every individual player needs to do his or her job. But every player needs to do only her job, or his job. So it wouldn’t make any sense for somebody. If you’ve got 11 players again, football and metaphor again, if you got 11 players that are all running a play, the thing that makes the play not work, and ultimately potentially can put other players in physical danger is the idea of a player deciding not to do his assignment and doing somebody else’s assignment instead.

Loree 14:57
It’s so interesting, ya know, There’s a poster at Facebook that says nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s job. So it makes me laugh thinking of that not because I think that’s wrong. But I think it’s interesting how those two things play together, right? And what you’re saying is that know what your job is and get it done. But that it’s also like if something comes up that is new, or potentially unsolvable or just is not explicitly within someone’s job description. It’s that attitude of Oh, well, that’s not me. So I’m not going to even think about how to fix it. You know

Scotty Perkins 15:33
what I mean? Right. 100%? And then the question is, is from a practical leadership perspective, how do you address that? So, again, in the football metaphor, you what we always learned was, we were all kind of groomed to have a particular affection for a quarterback. Right, and to respect the role of the quarterback don’t resent the role of the quarterback, but at the end of the day, there’s a quarterback, and the quarterbacks got to do the quarterbacks job, if there are two linemen, both of whom have blocking assignments to keep that quarterback from getting hurt, right. And one of those players decides to improvise that assignment. Almost certainly, there’s a player on the other side, that’s going to get to that quarterback and probably hurt that person. probably hurt your other player. At least the player is not gonna work best case, the plays not gonna work. Worst case, quarterback gets injured. And if that quarterback is pivotal to the strategy, we have a problem. Right? So the, you know, kind of coming back from a practical leadership perspective, I think we’ve all been in, in work situations where you have, you know, people that kind of take it upon themselves to go in and kind of meander around and try and do other people’s jobs. And in some cases, that might feel like it’s warranted, because you might have situations where individuals are not performing. And it’s okay to potentially help and offer support, but it’s not okay to just naturally assume other people’s roles. Yeah. And this goes back to the job of the leader, the coach, in this example, in that I personally have a really hard time with cultures that just admire the problem in perpetuity. Right, right. So you know, if there is a problem, and the problem simply needs to be addressed. And it’s blindingly obvious to everybody on the team, one very quick ensure way for the leader to lose credibility with the team is to perpetually admire the problem, meaning not addressing that role on the team, that is not getting done. Right. It’s a reasonable expectation for people on the team, in my mind, to expect that the leader would acknowledge a problem and fix it. Yeah, and not make it incumbent on others on the team just to figure it out. And this is another principle, which is not related to the what I would have been reading, but I firmly believe, which is if everybody’s accountable, nobody’s accountable. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of these are cliches, but I genuinely believe that one is really big, right? It’s Yeah, it’s like, Look, you gave me an assignment leader. I did my assignment. This other person’s assignment didn’t get done. You can’t come to the both of us and say, Why didn’t you do to just figure it out?

Loree 18:08
Yeah, I think there’s that that space where, like, leaders need to show up and be able to make those decisions and be able to hold people accountable for their roles and their responsibilities. And then I think there’s also that place where leaders need to decide like, where are they going to give people on the team the opportunity to step up and to make decisions that might be, you know, a little bit of a stretch for them or uncomfortable, but then the leaders always accountable for that and for making sure the team is working, and that is moving forward. And so even though the stretch opportunities are great, if it’s not working, then it’s the leaders responsibility to step in and make it work.

Scotty Perkins 18:46
Right, you know, no question. And so and this ties into, you know, yet another external principle that I really strongly believe in, and it’s been pretty transformative for me over the last 10 or so years. don’t remember exactly when his book came out, it says the Jocko willing.

Loree 19:02
Oh, yeah, the former seal Yeah.

Scotty Perkins 19:05
Yeah, fantastic. Really fantastic. In my opinion, this Extreme Ownership principle of ultimately, anything that goes wrong on the leaders watch is ultimately the leaders responsibility. Yeah. And the credibility that the leader builds with the team is his or her willingness to simply acknowledge that both up and down, right. On the one hand, if you as a team, were not prepared, I failed at making you prepared. Yeah. On the other hand, if I go and I try and make excuses to my superior chain, that the reasons why things failed, were for people that I didn’t really I didn’t prepare very well, or it’s kind of it was my team’s fault. It’s not really my fault. I did everything I could as the leader, right. Well, by definition, that clearly wasn’t true.

Unknown Speaker 19:53
Yeah,

Scotty Perkins 19:53
that’s such military leadership always starts with anything bad that happened on my watch is ultimately my Ideal. Yep. And being willing to represent that as publicly as possible, and being willing to identify corrective action and apply it. super important. Yeah. So it how all that comes together is Yeah. Make the team as prepared as they can be, be accountable for the results, ultimately as leader and identify things that need to be corrected and correct them. Right, and be willing to make difficult decisions if that’s what’s required. Right. Yeah. So the next one is actually one of my personal favorites. And this is one that I, I remembered at the time, it really resonated with me from a personality perspective. Because it was very easy when you’re dealing with other teenagers to see how impactful this principle could be, if you really got it. And this is the no showboats principle.

Unknown Speaker 20:51
Hmm, yeah.

Scotty Perkins 20:54
And, you know, we all in all aspects of life deal with personalities, in sports, or in work situations, or in interpersonal situations, were just self aggrandizing, folks, right? And what always seems to happen is that the more self aggrandizement happens, in my humble experience, the more likely is somebody to figure out a way to make you not have success in the future. Ah, yeah, like we have enough in front of us. There’s enough of in front of us in terms of challenges to justify figuring out how we can try and avoid creating new obstacles for ourselves just by being jerks.

Loree 21:42
So I’m guessing your coach is not a fan of spiking the football on

Scotty Perkins 21:46
touchdowns. Oh, my goodness, if there was ever a situation that even sniffed like that, not only would you be benched, but the amount of extra conditioning that you would earn for yourself would be so oppressive and so miserable, that it would never in a million years occur to you to do that, again, even if it was spontaneous. Like, there, there were situations I think each of us can remember on the team where we just spontaneously were really excited. Like, and it came across to the coach as being disrespectful to the other team. Oh, yeah. And he was like, absolutely not. Like, this is a close enough game. We don’t need them to be angry at us and wanting to beat us. Right? It’s one of those that’s This is interesting. I, you, you go and you see, you know, I really, I really want to look at this situation, I really want to put that person in his place. I really want to differentiate by you know, rubbing stuff in and then you go to what end? To what Yeah, yeah. And it’ll make you feel good in the short term. But it will, the only thing it can do in the long term is make things potentially more difficult for you later. So your job if you had the privilege of carrying the ball or catching the ball or whatever, if your job was to score the points, and then promptly run over to the official hand the ball of the official and go back and run the next play. Yeah, that was your job.

Loree 23:14
Yep. You can celebrate in the locker room.

Scotty Perkins 23:17
You can celebrate in the locker room in private. Right? Yeah. And, and then be thankful for all of the good fortune that you had in order that allows you to win. Yeah, gratitude, and super interesting there. And the next principle, and this is a sensory principle that is well applied here, but maintaining the perception of strength. This is one where, when we were on the sidelines, or even on the field, it didn’t matter how physically exhausted we were. It was, we would never be allowed to actually look exhausted to the other team.

Loree 23:52
No, no, like deception operations there.

Scotty Perkins 23:55
There’s maybe a little psyops there. But at the end of the day you like even in practice, and this was something we would get drilled and drilled and drilled, even in practice. You couldn’t stand there with your hands on your hips, you had to run back to the huddle. If you were standing on the sidelines, you couldn’t sit be relaxed unless you were given permission, like if you were to take a single knee, right? Always Be prepared to get up and be as just as vigorous on the next play as we were. And I get to the point where I remember, you know, here I am, 25 years later, you know, get out on my mountain bike, and being old and fat and getting to the top of the hill and thinking to myself, Oh, man, I’m just beat that that hill just kicked my butt and then sitting up there and I just naturally put my hands on my hips and I immediately heard my coach’s voice in my head, and I immediately dropped my hands into my boss because he was so ingrained, right, wow. But that was all ideas that were already undersized. We’re already under talented. We don’t need the opponents to be thinking That we were also exhausted and they had us on the ropes. And so that how many other different areas of life does that apply itself? Right? It doesn’t really matter how tired you are, go in, and nobody else has to know that nobody else has to know how close to defeat you might be. The last principle here is just that you different players are motivated in very different ways. And this is just taking the time to understand the different mechanisms of people being motivated carrots versus sticks. And not you know, one size doesn’t fit all. You can’t shame people into performing. Yeah, all the time. Sometimes it works. Some are super motivated by that. Almost always they have very different backgrounds from others who are not motivated by that at all. Yeah. And I personally am not a person who gets motivated by being told how stupid I am.

Loree 25:52
Do you really know anyone who’s motivated by that? I know people

Scotty Perkins 25:55
who respond to that? Well, yeah, which is different than being motivated by that. Yeah, right. I know, people who have been fueled by anger, and misfortune in a lot of different areas of their life. And ultimately, when they get that feedback, they will tactically perform. My complimentary experience to that is, those people burn bright and burn out. Yeah, they end up performing really well in the short view. But ultimately, they get spent, and they either leave, or they just can’t keep up pace, for reasons that are totally reasonable over time. So ultimately, it’s figuring out what actually motivates people in the durable future, and giving them what they need, while also holding them accountable to the things that they should be doing on their own. When you get older, and you get to start applying some of these things to your own teams, you know, being able to have differentiated conversations between people that have different motivating tactics, and being able to adjust your style to understanding what that looks like, ultimately, kind of recognizing, here’s your job, what do you need to do your job is what you don’t have my fault. And if what you don’t have is my fault, I need to work harder at getting that thing to you. What you’re not doing as a result of you, either not applying what you’ve been given or not working hard enough. That’s also on me. Yeah, yeah, how to get you to that place. And if you can’t get to that place, I’m just going to make a decision that is best for all of us, but maybe find a different role for you to be in and I’ve asked you to play.

Loree 27:30
Yeah, those are amazing principles. I mean, I can see how they’ve, you know, had such a positive influence in your life and formative influence where it’s helped develop you into the leader you are today.

Scotty Perkins 27:43
Such as that is, I reserve the right to get Smarter Every Day. That’s a favorite quote of mine from a former leader of mine, former mentor of mine, Alan Dixon of Alan, if you’re out there, appreciate that one. Yet, one of the first meetings I was ever in your senior executive, we got a big room of people. And he’s listening. And he makes a statement. And then he opens up the room and he says, tell me what about that was wrong? Because I reserve the right to get smarter. Yeah, I love that. And then being willing to hear that feedback, being really willing to push back on it. It’s not in any minute. He’s like, I’m smart. I got here because I’m smart. And he didn’t say that out loud. He wouldn’t. But you know, yeah, I’m credible in this job. And I’m only going to get more credible if I recognize the areas where I need to get smarter, and make myself available to get smarter.

Loree 28:33
Yeah, and also things are always changing. So I feel like we’re always learning. Even if we think we know everything about something, then that thing changes and we need to learn more. So for sure, you know, in the spirit of learning, are there any like leadership books or even movies that have inspired you?

Scotty Perkins 28:51
Probably if I had to pick one. It’s the Extreme Ownership book that Jocko Willink book and listening, you know, his podcasts are great, they’re long, they’re investment of time. But you can kind of go through and look at some of the themes that he lists. His podcast is fantastic, because because he basically will go through and he will, he will get somebody asking a series of questions, you know, how would you apply these principles to this scenario, and then you kind of roleplay it out. And so that basic Extreme Ownership principle, where I’m the leader, it was my team, my team either succeeded or didn’t succeed. If they didn’t succeed, it ultimately was something that I had responsibility for previously correcting. And if I if if they and if I don’t correct it, and it happens again, there is nobody’s fault that nobody can blame anybody but me on that.

Loree 29:41
Yeah. And also, I think, like, I’m not a perfect leader, so I’m going to make mistakes. And I need to know how to make myself better as a leader, I think, where a lot of leaders get into trouble and I’m definitely speaking from personal experience is that it’s easy to take it personally when you’re being told that you’re not as good as you You are that you want to be. And so getting that feedback and determining how can I learn from this and make myself a better leader in service of others, rather than feeling like, Oh, God, I suck. I think that, at least for me, personally, that’s been a really interesting journey over the last, you know, 30 some odd years that I’ve been leading teams, but and also helping people on my teams understand that feedback, that if things aren’t going well, hey, you know, either this might not be the role for you, or maybe there’s something else that you should be focusing on. Or here’s how you can improve that. Feedback is a challenging one, I think sometimes. And if you can disassociate it from who you are as a person, but still taking in the spirit of improving yourself, then I think it works well.

Scotty Perkins 30:50
So let’s let’s riff on that for a quick second. Because I think that’s also super important is that, you know, there’s a component of leadership that involves a lot of personal individual and very personal development. Yeah, you’re going to get feedback from leaders. Assuming in many cases, erroneously, the leaders that you’re getting the feedback from got into the positions they got, because they were ready to assume those roles. Yeah, right. And you’re dealing with senior executives dealing with a CEO, you’re dealing with a board member, and they’re giving you this feedback. And I said, Well, they must be speaking from a position of really deep credibility, if they’re giving me this feedback. And in some cases, that’s true. And in some cases, it’s not. Yeah, you said you being intellectually honest with yourself, and being able to separate is this feedback that I’m getting based on a genuine opportunity for me versus is this feedback I’m getting based on a bias that maybe this person is bringing to the conversation, and having enough of your own background and being able to step back and say, yeah, that feedback I’m getting, actually, this is me managing my boss’s anxieties, more than it’s me managing something that I really did wrong.

Unknown Speaker 31:59
Yeah.

Scotty Perkins 32:00
But then also saying, being willing to say, to look at that same situation and say, yeah, that part and this other part, and this other part I genuinely liked, and I need to go. Right. Yeah. And being willing to go do that. That actually begs one more principle, that, I also think is super important, which is being willing not to add too much value.

Loree 32:27
Okay, you’re gonna need to explain that one. Yeah.

Scotty Perkins 32:31
This value principle of adding too much value as a leader is one where you recognize that in order for something to be ultimately successful, the team has to take ownership over it. Right? Yeah. And if the team doesn’t ultimately really contribute to the construction of the plan, it’s just you basically dictating to the plan, and they’re just going in executing it because they got told to go do it. And so the principle of adding too much value is, is that if you got somebody who’s worked really hard on a plan, and they come to you, and they say, here’s my plan, and I’m gonna go execute it, it’s gonna be amazing. And then the first thing that you as the leader do say, great plan, except you need to change this and that, and this and that, and this and this, and that’s not right. Yeah. Then all of a sudden, it’s not their plan anymore. It’s your plan. Yeah, the principle of not adding too much value is is looking at the plan that you were presented, identifying the things that you might personally change, and then determining before you say anything, whether or not any of those individual things that you might propose to change, are material. Yeah. Yeah. Because if they don’t need to be brought up. Don’t bring them up. Yeah, cuz any single thing you choose to bring up, will basically reduce the level of ownership and investment emotionally in that person in the plan that they need.

Loree 33:48
You know, I think it’s really interesting what you’re saying about a feedback in differentiating the feedback that you’re getting a because I think earlier in my career, and maybe for years, as well, like there’s more of that tendency to want to believe the leaders who are managing you and make that assumption that they know what they’re doing and that they’re right. And I think as you get more experienced in your career, you start realizing, oh, wow, okay, actually, there are other, there are multiple factors in play here. And I need to really assess personally, what lands and what is maybe something different. I’m wondering, for someone who’s just starting out in their career, like, what would you tell them to help them differentiate that feedback and understand what really is appropriate for me versus what might be irrelevant?

Scotty Perkins 34:33
It’s hard. It’s hard is the person being managed? Yeah, to get good at that. And a lot of it just involves doing work, just kind of understanding some of the basic principles of emotional intelligence and, you know, understanding how people can be gaslighted versus how they can actually improve. Yeah, I don’t actually have any real strong feedback or real strong ideas as to how to do that. But the more you understand about how people generally relate with each other, the more you can vote Be more intellectually honest with yourself, and also help your manager, be a better manager, help your leader be a better leader. And in some cases, just separating that out. And there may be I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine earlier today, in a tough work situation, really just feeling beat down all the time doesn’t feel like that person can make can really just make a difference always feels like they’re always feels like they’re succeeding, but at the end of the day, not ever being credit for for objective success. Yeah. And the and there comes a point where you say, this person can’t I am doing all the things I genuinely can. And I can continue to try and smash my head against that wall, or I can find for myself a different role. Yeah, that works for me that I can be successful. And what is that? That’s Extreme Ownership? Hmm. It’s I am leading myself by recognizing that I can control the things I can control. And if I choose to stay in this toxic management environment, and I don’t do what’s right for me, I am the problem. I am the one admiring the problem. Wow. Right? That being able to have that conversation with yourself is tough because it involves taking risks, right? It involves trying to find a new job or going and finding a new team or whatever. And, and I don’t know anybody that’s ever had that conversation with themselves and hasn’t ultimately turned out well. Right

Loree 36:24
now, that’s fantastic advice. Yeah, I’m definitely gonna go listen to Jocko xpac. podcast, you should get a commission. Thank you so much, Scotty. I really appreciate you talking with me today. And I love the principle What was your coach’s name? His name is Kevin Carroll. Kevin Carroll. Awesome. It’s really cool to see the influence his principals have had on you and so many other people in terms of leadership and building teams. So I appreciate you sharing those today with us.

Scotty Perkins 36:51
Happy to do it. Thank you for the invitation.

Loree 36:53
Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 36:57
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai