The Role of a Leader with Dave Conner | 065

Welcome to Lean Leadership for Ops Managers, the podcast for leaders in Ops Management who want to spark improvement, foster engagement, and boost problem solving – AND still get their day job done. Here’s your host, Leadership Trainer, Lean Enthusiast, and Spy Thriller Junkie, Jamie V. Parker. 

What does it mean to be a leader at your organization? Does everyone have the same concept? And does that concept include both this people centric leadership and decision making and delivering results and improvement? We’re going to dive into this topic with today’s guest. That’s right.  

Today we are kicking off our Q4 Executive Series, and in this series you will hear from Dave Conner, CFO and COO at Anchor Industries, Kelly Ogunsanya, CEO at Stride Community Health Center, and David Pender, vice president of operations at SAGE-Glass. We’ll take a little break for Thanksgiving, and then after that, we’re going to come back to the series and you’ll hear from Jasmine Gorey, Vice President of Human Resources at Sunland Logistics Solutions, and Chris Chippendale, who’s a senior vice president of northern operations at Credit Union. So super excited about this Q4 executive series. I hope you will tune in.  

And for today, I’m really thrilled to bring you this conversation with Dave Connor now. Dave plays dual roles as both the CFO and the COO at Anchor Industries, which is one of the leading manufacturers in the U.S. for frame and fabric products. Now you’ve probably seen one of their high quality event tents or awnings or canopies, or clear structures or pool covers. You’ve probably seen one, and if you haven’t seen one in person, you might have seen one like on TV or on the news online.   

Now here’s the thing I work with Dave in the Anchor Operations Leadership team. They’re a client; I love them. I love partnering with Dave, and I also really love working with the rest of the operations leadership team. What I will tell you is that they are passionate and they give so much to serving their teams and serving their customers. So, listen, this is going to be a little bit of a longer episode, but I highly encourage you to listen all the way through. If you need to come back to it, you can come back to it and pick up where you left off. All right, enough of my preamble. Let’s jump in.

Jamie: [00:02:45] All right, Dave, welcome to the show today. 

Dave: [00:02:48] Thank you, Jamie. Good to be here.

Jamie: [00:02:50] Yeah, I’m so glad to chat with you today, and we are just going to jump right in to learn a little bit about you and your organization. So starting off, what is a value, mantra, principle, quote, something that you feel really embodies your beliefs about leadership? 

Dave: [00:03:06] Yeah, it’s interesting starting with that question, because I find it actually a really difficult question. I think I’ve been doing this leadership thing for, you know, 35-40 years in different avenues with different teams and different types and structures of teams. And I keep learning new things about how to how to lead. So I think the way I would have answered that five years ago is different than 10 years and might be different than tomorrow.  

So if I guess if there was one thing, then I would say having a servant heart toward people because you have to, you have to grab the hearts and minds and souls of people to get them to, to want to engage and do something different for the organization. So some aspect of that, that servant leadership where you help people gain purpose, you know, the purpose in their life here at Anchor. And I think that carries on to purpose in their life beyond Anchor. 

Jamie: [00:04:16] Yeah. So good. Especially just thinking about what’s in my heart. So it’s not just about actions and things I do, but where am I coming from? You know, what’s who am I really? And what am I? What am I really here for? 

Dave: [00:04:30] Right? Early on in my career, I know it would have been much more focused on just get the job done, get the job done as long as you get to the job. Get that finished, that finished mark, then you were successful. But I think it’s much, much bigger than that. Yeah, if you’re going to sustain especially. 

Jamie: [00:04:49] Yeah. All right. Well, let’s just learn a little bit about your organization. Who does your organization serve and how do you create value? 

Dave: [00:04:58] Ok, so I work for Anchor Industries, so we are the leading tent manufacturer in North America. So we make big tents, not camp tents, but tents for backyard weddings or corporate events or PGA tournaments. You might see our tents out on the 18th green of a PGA tournament kind of thing. So larger tents.   

We also deal and fire shelters for firemen and firewomen that are out fighting all these fires out on the West Coast right now so that it’s actually a blanket. So they’re all fabric products that the blanket the fire person would put over the top of them if the wind shifts kind of thing.  

And then we make pull covers. We make a few thousand pull covers and pull covers season and they’re all custom pull covers. So we make pool products. They save the life of a little kid who walks out onto the pool cover. So it’s a safety pull cover or it saves the life of someone fighting a fire in Oregon or California if they need to crawl underneath this blanket or just creates lots of great moments.   

If it’s a tent for a wedding or they’re just they’re happy moments in people’s lives. So I think we we have an enormous amount of purpose in all the products, and our challenge is just to always make sure that all our team members feel that same purpose. But that’s who Anchor Industries is. 

Jamie: [00:06:28] Yes, I love it. I love when I have guests on who talk about the impact and the purpose, and it’s just so much fun to see that connection. Yeah, yeah. All right.  

Well, you at Anchor are Lean thinking or Lean thinking leader and leaning organization. So let’s start there. Talk to me about kind of why Lean what is the role improvement thinking plays in your organizational strategy? 

Dave: [00:06:55] Yeah, so Lean has been part of our culture for about 12 years. It’s it’s one of those things where Anchor, you know, like just let’s just take the tent world as an example in the the sixties, seventies, eighties, you know, Anchor was the tent industry. I mean, we created a lot of the products that that was, you know, we were the largest and this idea of a vinyl tent for corporate event or again, a backyard wedding or whatever, using material like that to create a tent.   

Tents obviously go back to time of Moses, but we were the leader in North America. But as it happens to all leaders, whether you’re Henry Ford and the Model T or you’re the number one tent manufacturer you can, you can get soft. And I think Anchor was a company that was losing some market share. We went from having three or four competitors to having to go to a trade show. Now you might have thirty-five competitors from around the world.  

And so our ability and, we did from the smallest tent up to something that could be, you know, three football fields long, you know, like down at the border right now is an example, the immigrants that are coming up there, a lot of those tents might be Anchor tents, so they just wide variety of purposes. But with that, you when you do such a wide variety of things, you’ve got competitors that are going into different segments of those markets and they’re trying to knock you off and Anchor got fat and soft.  

And over the course of time, what we’ve realized is that we’ve got to sharpen ourselves big time and we went out searching, you know, 12, 15 years ago, what are the current methodologies that are happening in the manufacturing community that are bringing about more competitive dynamic workplaces and came across Lean and Lean thinking and started doing book clubs and things? But anyway, that was the start of the journey. It was the only thing that we saw as having been fundamentally sustainable. We want to move the organization forward, make it more competitive. You have to have Lean thinking to be able to accomplish that.

Jamie: [00:09:28] Mm hmm. And so you’re, you know, 12 years into this and you’re firmly in that belief now still. 

Dave: [00:09:35] Yes. Yes. Yeah, it’s been quite the transition from Book Club with senior leadership to driving it, having some success, you know, going from, you know, freeing up millions of dollars of inventory, just some of the basic things that you can get from a Lean journey up front. I can remember still a few years ago where  supervisors and the floor thought, you know, Anchor’s going out of business because all of a sudden, instead of millions of dollars of WIP, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars of work in process because you’re flowing your material so much more efficiently and effectively through the plant. So it’s just it’s a it’s a major evolution of of getting more and more people thinking Lean thinking, Yeah, 

Jamie: [00:10:24] Ok, so you have been practicing this, practicing this way of thinking for a while, kind of getting better, doing going into different ways. You’ve had some results and impacts and positive changes. But it seemed like, you know, to achieve what you were wanting to go like, that true north vision that there were still a little something missing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dave: [00:10:46] Yeah, it’s probably been the biggest frustration. And from my own personal journey, like we talked about at the beginning about what’s leadership means, but I think figuring out how to make it sustainable, how to make your journey sustainable, you know, you have different pockets of success. You have different leaders that that kind of touch it and feel it and smell it and taste it. But to be able to expand that and to duplicate that throughout your plant, because that’s what’s going to make you really game changer kind of stuff.   

And so we even did back in 2016, we did like a two day training. This is just an example. We did a two day training where we put 40 or 50 leaders through all the key principles of Lean and how to think about problem solving and continuous improvement in general. But when you don’t have ways of feeding them with what happens after the two days, you know what happens with the next problem they have and they expire, they’ve got to put out on the floor.   

And we just didn’t have sustainable ways of teaching people. And so when we went to Amy in Chicago and that kind of frustrating time period, I think in 2019, you know, again, we’ve done this 2016. We had created we’ve put more around this what we call our Anchor Performance System of Improvement, but we just didn’t have a way of again sustaining and duplicating that learning and that knowledge.  

So we went to Amy with a real specific target of saying, Can we find somebody that can help us take our key leadership at all levels, first level, second level, third level at anchor and try to teach them about the principles of Lean in ways that make those principles stick so that they can apply them in their day to day interaction. 

Jamie: [00:13:00] Ok, so you’re thinking about so OK, I need to develop leaders right here. Here’s where leaders are going to be the key. You’re right, they’re the linchpin of being able to really have that sustainable long term success that continues on and on.

Dave: [00:13:15] Yes. Yes. And needed to find that. And I know this podcast isn’t a commercial for Jamie V. Parker, but we needed someone, which is what you’ve been doing with us over the last couple of years. We needed somebody that could come in, understand our business, understand how we apply because anybody that’s been in the Lean journey realizes that how you make a tent is different than how you make a pull covers different, how you make a fire shelter and awning, or 5000 other industries. It’s just not a cookie-cutter kind of thing.  

So we needed somebody that could come in, learn our business, learn how we think about things like safety, quality, delivery, productivity or cost, and apply that into a teaching curriculum that can then help people engage in the journey of what we’re trying to do at Anchor and then sustain it, which again, is the absolute key to all this, as you’ve got to figure out how to sustain the improvements that you make. Mm hmm.

Jamie: [00:14:24] All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit then about leadership at Anchor because here you’ve identified, you know, all of these leaders who are really critical and being able for them to become Lean thinkers. And one of the things I think we also discovered is that there’s also that people component of, you know, respect for people in Lean thinking. And I know that you have your anchor leader mindset, which is really the foundation where you’ve defined this is what it means to be a leader and anchor. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dave: [00:14:57] Yeah. Anchor leader mindset. It came out of that same Amy conference in Chicago, and I think it’s a game-changer as we have done here at Anchor. And it’s interesting because when I reflect on the whole journey of the last 12 years, what we didn’t have was a consistent message to what we even wanted the leadership to be. How did we want them to think about why they’re a leader at Anchor and what did what was their mindset that they needed to have? And so it was interesting.   

It was our VP of manufacturing, a VP of engineering or COO myself, after one of the sessions going to another hotel down the street and over a couple couple drinks kind of thing with the napkin started kind of what is it we’re trying to create at Anchor? What is a leader need to look like?   

So anyway, the shorter story is we came up with three layers of leadership and there’s a top and a bottom and then sandwiched in between that is getting the job done. And the top is that that you have to be someone who wants to have a servant heart. You just have to care about people you have to. People are only going to follow you if they feel like like you’re someone who cares about them as a as an individual and a person. So at the top layer, it’s having that servant leadership part. 

And at the bottom layer, it’s that we we have what we call our foundational values is reach. So those four letter stand for respect, engage, achieve through learning, you have to want to learn, learn, learn, learn, courage and humility. And it’s easy to have the fluffy words. I really believe we make them meaningful. We teach them. We talk about them in orientation. We’re constantly communicating them.  

And so if you’re going to have a successful Lean journey and you’re going to create a competitive, long term sustaining organization in our mind, you have that servant leadership who at the bottom has that ability to demonstrate reach because it’s only when you demonstrate can you have other people follow you and do the same to the people that they are leading.   

And so if you have those two components of the top and the bottom, then in the middle of that, we call this the middle layer lead with purpose and you have to understand leadership purposes is the most critical, but it can only happen if you have the top and the bottom layer. But the lead with purpose is what are you doing with your department? What are you doing with your production line? What are you doing with your quality systems if you’re in charge of quality? You have to understand your current state at Anchor.  

We call that Point A. People get tired of me talking about, what is your point A and what’s your point B, but your current state is your point A.. And then you have to have a vision for point B, whether it’s improvements in quality or delivery or productivity or safety. Whatever it is, you have to have a vision of what that department looks like, whether it’s six months from now, a year from now, five years from now.  

What is your point B and when you have that point B in your mind, when you get up and come into work every day, you know this is your point. A you have a vision for point B, you’ll make different decisions because you are constantly thinking about how I get to point B, but I can’t do it if I don’t know how to engage people. Mm hmm.  

And so those three layers is what we call the Anchor Leader Mindset. And you’re only going to be successful at Anchor if you have the desire to learn what all three of those layers mean. And again, that’s been part of the missing piece is having the ability to train our people to teach our people what those three mean and to be able to to teach them how to lead with purpose. So that’s the journey that we’re in the middle of right now. 

Jamie: [00:19:11] Yeah, I think there was, I’m not sure when the timing was, but there was a point where all of that connected for me in working with you and your team. You know, we started off with a lot of the kind of foundational leadership pieces with, you know, leading with reach and people interactions and some things that we needed to really make sure were there. And then this kind of really adding in this element of lead with purpose and how am I improving when we combine. There was a point at which this all really, you know, worked for me, I’m like, OK, we can do this. 

Dave: [00:19:46] I remember the meeting it was I’m not sure exactly the specifics of what we were talking about, but I could tell the meeting that clicked for you.

Jamie: [00:19:57] Yeah, absolutely. So why? So I believe in the value of all three of these working together. Why do you think it’s so important that all three of these are being achieved? And particularly, you know, if we if, let’s say we do have the servant’s heart, but you know, everyone in leadership has that. But adding both of those pieces of leading with reach and then leading with purpose, which is where we’re going to achieve our performance for our clients, why do we need we really have to have both of those? How do those work together to have transformation?

Dave: [00:20:28] It kind of comes back to your first question about leadership. And just, I guess, my evolution over the lifetime of learning about leadership is one without the other. It just doesn’t work. And people take a lot of hard knocks until they learn that. But you can have the greatest servant heart and you can care so much for people. And that’s all great and it’s wonderful. But if it doesn’t create a successful company that keeps those people employed and keeps the people reporting to them employed and growing, and then you’ve had a servant heart and you haven’t accomplished.  

And the same can be true if you’re just about leading with purpose. And yes, you can get some things done in the short term because you’re just a hard, you know what? That knows how to drive change. You’re not going to sustain it.  

And so if you don’t capture the heart, mind and soul of people and then have a vision for Point B of where you’re trying to go, if you don’t combine those things together, you won’t have success. But when you do, what we’ve seen here is powerful things, you know, doubling productivity, which means doubling output per person, you know, cutting in half the number of quality issues. And you have to continue to learn to fail, learn from it and keep going.   

We’ve had great success in our frame shop. We’ve seen productivity go up 50 percent in our frame shop. But at the same time, our quality went backwards because we still didn’t have enough of the quality systems in place. And so you build on that, you fail some you see that, you know, your productivity got a lot better, your output per person got a lot better, but your quality systems still needed a lot of work. And right now we’re putting in place much, much better quality systems. So you just have to keep keep that journey going. But it doesn’t happen if all three of those pieces are part of the puzzle. 

Jamie: [00:22:29] Yeah, and that’s what then makes us so, so critical. We’ve got to spend the time and energy because I know you do invest a lot of time in your leaders and you know, you have front line leaders coming off the floor for development and then on the floor for practice. All of that.

Dave: [00:22:48] Yes, it’s been a huge that’s been a huge challenge of this past year. You know, is this COVID year and and being so busy because we went from plummeting 50 percent because we’re a party event industry, well, events stopped, right, but then all of a sudden we became an industry that was was taken care of, drive through clinics and temporary hospitals and and tents on the border. And all these other purposes that were were still, you know, wonderful purposes for what we do.  

But the challenge has been, but I think we’ve done pretty good at staying focused on the development of people. It been so easy to say, let’s stop and we’ll pick this up in 2022 and things settle down. But what you find is when you push people into this development process at a time when things are as crazy as they’ve been for Anchor this past year, where we’ve doubled the size of our company kind of thing. When that happens, now you really get to see, you know, the people that want to develop, that want to grow, that want to learn, and those that are just, you know, it’s just not the right place for them kind of thing. 

Jamie: [00:24:06] Yeah. You know, Gary Peterson was on recently and he was talking about, you know, even at OC Tanner, where, you know, they’ve had just tremendous success for decades. And he said that when you know, kind of the pandemic started, you get into that, oh, we’re sending people home that the first thing that happened is people stop doing the meetings and the CI work. And he was shocked.  

He’s like, Whoa, we had to he had to course correct that, you know, just and we talked about the ideas of like in crisis or in difficult times or in high emotion times. That’s when we need to really double down on our Lean thinking from a process standpoint in our, you know, human centered leadership from, you know, a people standpoint, we’ve got to have that and those are the times that it’s hardest to do like. It’s hard to do it and make that commitment at that time. It’s so important. 

Dave: [00:24:54] Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

 Jamie: [00:24:57] So, let me just ask you. Looking back over the last 12 months? Do you think that, you know, like, Hey, we’re plummeting and then we’re growing, we’ve got tremendous demand. Is that what you consider kind of one of those biggest leadership challenges? Or is there something else you would say?

 Dave: [00:25:12] Oh, that for for sure. Yeah, yeah. One of the biggest challenges, I think in my lifetime of leadership was what we’ve experienced this past year. And again, it’s the emotional people center piece of that that that also, you know, got tightly woven into a major demand that was put on this company and those same people.  

 And so our leadership, our leadership techniques, had to change our ability to communicate at a rapid pace as as you know, and the whole world knows, if you have 300 people, there’s 300 opinions about about how to handle the COVID, you know, from a, you know, just from an operational standpoint, you know, the mask and the six foot distancing and the shields and, you know, all those kind of things. And and so you not only had all the emotions of of that, but you had this tremendous demand that you had to get out the door. So yeah, that by far, I think, has been the challenge. But I think we adopted different methodologies to to help get us through all of that.

 Jamie: [00:26:26] Anything that you’d say is a lesson learned or something either that went well or that you learned through that process that you’re taking with you moving forward.

 Dave: [00:26:33] Yeah, I think communication being more consistent. It’s funny. And, you know, I’ve talked about this, you know, for 35-40 years. I’ve been leading teams and I wasn’t as consistent about like daily meetings. COVID pushed us and maybe a combination of working with you and the tremendous stress of COVID. But the daily meeting that we do as an ops team where you got your, you know, top 12-14 leaders that every single morning you’re talking about all these things. And you know, one morning it might be focused on, you know, issues with team members that you need in different lines. In the next on on what’s the latest CDC guidelines. And, you know, but just that daily interaction.  

 So I’d say as a total team, the daily interaction and then I think all of us as leaders have gotten better with one on one communication. Something again that I just didn’t practice as well as I should have in my lifetime is monthly one on one and it could be by bi monthly, bi weekly, whatever it is. But for me and my team, it’s monthly one on one. And again, when you’re going through so much change that that’s been a real effective tool, it just staying connected both interpersonally. And on what your vision be or what’s your what’s what’s that point B look like for you? You’re trying to take your team. So so that’s all been been good lessons learned.

 Jamie: [00:28:10] Yeah, it’s so funny because I mean, you’re over a year into these daily operations, daily production meetings, right? So here you are a year later, and I to me, I just the team, the team dynamic and working, the collaboration that was built primarily through, you know, through those and through some other things as well. But like, I just I don’t see you stopping this.

 Dave: [00:28:33] No, no way. No way. It’s only if one of our value stream leaders that has a joke of the day that he it’s only if he runs out would we stop. And that’s part of it, too, is you got to bring a little, you know, there’s just so much stress on an organization when you’re trying to accomplish what you are. Yeah, but we we end every meeting with a joke of the day in the same guy delivers it almost every day, and it’s it’s amazing what comes from such a simple thing.

 Jamie: [00:29:06] Yeah, yeah. All right. So then looking forward to, you know, the next year or so, what do you think are the leadership opportunities that you expect, you know, manufacturing organizations are going to face or like those those big fears or maybe points of nervousness, what do you think you’ve got to look out for moving forward?

 Dave: [00:29:24] Yeah, maybe my mind is just too COVID focused, but I think it’s COVID COVID COVID. I think so. All of our industries are just so impacted by that, the supply chain trying to figure out how to get the raw materials you need. But but with all this, I don’t think this roller coaster rides over. You know, companies that have doubled might be be doubled for another year, or they might be cut in half. Once you get through it and things stabilize a little bit. But leadership teams having the ability to react to whatever is thrown at them as it relates to COVID. Supply chain, world and demand world that’s pretty mixed up right now. I think that’s going to be that’s going to be our biggest challenges.

 Jamie: [00:30:10] Yeah, and hence the thing, whether you know, whatever way it is, it’s that need for organizational agility which to have. You have to have those Lean thinking and leaders who can lead people and think in that way.

 Dave: [00:30:24] Yes. Yeah, for sure. And as we get better at leading with purpose, our ability to be an agile organization is, I mean, it’s so much better today than it was two years ago than it was five years ago, because we’re all talking the same language. You know, when we talk about what’s happening and you know, you get twenty five production lines, but when you’re all talking the same language you can, you’re so much more flexible about. Take this line up, bring this line down. You know, look out the next four to six weeks. What’s going on with demand? You’re just talking the same language. And and that’s that’s powerful.

 Jamie: [00:31:03] Yeah, fantastic. All right. Well, we’re going to wrap up. So what words of encouragement or advice would you leave our listeners with?

 Dave: [00:31:13] I think I’ll just say, what advice do I give myself? So the advice that I constantly give myself is keep looking in the mirror, keep yourself reflecting on what’s working and what’s not working. Be willing to to adjust when you need to adjust. Stay positive through a pretty wacky world that’s going on in manufacturing right now and stay true to the principles. And if you stay true to the principles you’re going to have, you know, good things are going to happen.

 Jamie: [00:31:50] Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure.

 Dave: [00:31:54] Jamie, it’s been a huge pleasure for me. Take care.

 Jamie: [00:32:00] I’ve got some important stuff to share that I think you’re going to want to hear. But first, for your next step, reflect on this episode and write down your one key takeaway. You know that one thing you don’t want to let slip by you, right? It’s that one thing you don’t want to get too busy and forget. So what is that? Write it down and then share it. You could share it with your team. You could share it with your leader. You could share it with a colleague or friend. Or you can also share it on LinkedIn. Just remember to tag me Jamie V. Parker. And of course, you can connect with Dave and learn more about Anchor Industries at our show notes processplusresults.com/podcast.  

 All right, so let’s talk about this episode for just a minute. There was a ton here, and it was all like backed in, and it was awesome and I loved it. But you could not see this because you’re, of course, listening to a podcast, so you couldn’t see what was happening. But when Dave and I were talking about the time when kind of the Anchor Leader Mindset all like clicked for me, you couldn’t see him. But what he was doing, he was laughing, right? He was chuckling. And it’s because it was it’s true. There really was this point. And you know, at the beginning when we first started working together, you know, this Anchor Leader Mindset was brand new for them.

 Jamie: [00:33:15] They were just starting to, you know, like talk about it and share it and get feedback on it and adjust it. And so it was still kind of this, this new thing. And for me, when I would integrate this because I always integrated it, but when I would integrate it into the work we were doing with People leadership development and culture and that kind of thing. I would also often talk about it in pieces, so  

I would take one of the layers that you heard, Dave, talk about it and take the one that was most relevant to what we were talking about and kind of reference back to it. And when I did say, remember, this is the Anchor Leader Mindset, I would often like reorder them so I would talk about the servant’s heart. And then I would talk about leading with reach. And then I would talk about lead with purpose last and lead with purpose ended up at the bottom.  

 And so to me, that was like, Oh yeah, of course, that makes so much more sense. That’s the way it flows. But I didn’t have that whole sandwich analogy this whole layers and then this part in between and I need the top in the bottom layer in order to accomplish it, right? That just was it part of my understanding? Yep. And I also was kind of thinking like my initial reaction was lead with purpose. It was more like, you know, alignment and organizational purpose and connection and rah rah, right? And not so much the ACDP execution to that point of really the execution, the performance and the progression part.

 Jamie: [00:34:43] So once I really understood lead with purpose and what it was really about and it wasn’t just like I didn’t let the word purpose derail me. Instead, I got, you know, really focused on what is lead with purpose really mean today, even the leadership team in Anchor. And then, you know, kind of this analogy. Then I was able to really better use it as a core of how we develop leaders at Anchor. Right. And so this is actually one of the reasons why I do so much work with organizations who are practicing Lean Continuous improvement.  

 And, you know, a lot of times my leadership development work is a better fit for organizations than the off the shelf generic leadership program. And those are all great. I love all the, you know, like the different off the shelf leadership programs that are kind of typically generic. They go across lots of industries and lots of different organizations and from small sizes to big enterprises and all the things. And they’re like, Oh, here’s this leadership at a big umbrella. And you know, I have studied those and learn from those and taken those and adjusted based off of my real world experience running operations and running leadership development, running continuous improvement.  

 But what the work I do is integrating your Lean strategy, right? So integrating leadership development with your Lean strategy, with your improvement, thinking with the type of work that that Dave talked about here with his Anchor Leader Mindset.

 Jamie: [00:36:08] And so a lot of times, you know, I can actually come in and help make leadership development, not this thing. That’s this extra, but it actually really gets integrated in and it amplifies your improvement results, your culture results and your leadership development altogether. Ok, so side note, I got off on a tangent there, so I know let’s come back. So here’s what I really wanted to talk to you about.  

 So the Anchor Leader Mindset has parallels that you can see to my work. So do you remember the four P’s to Leading Excellence? If you don’t, there’s like I don’t know four podcast episodes about it. So we’ll put those in the show notes you can go and find those episodes. But so think of a circle with four quadrants in it. And the right side of that circle has two quadrants, which are purpose and participation, and the left side of the circle has two quadrants, which are performance and progression. And in the middle, there is a heart rate like an actual red heart right in the middle where all four, we’re all four of those intersect. And that’s really a heart for people. So if I were to connect the dots for this, if I were to show to draw these parallels, I would say that lead with the servant’s heart is like the heart in the middle of my four P model.

 Jamie: [00:37:26] And I would say that lead with reach kind of aligns with that right side of the circle, right? So with purpose and participation and how we’re really interacting with people and treating people and all that then lead with purpose in the anchor leader mindset really aligns with the left side of the circle where we talk about performance and progression and systematic improvement.  

 And you know what, Dave would say having a point A to point B and having Productive conflict to move the organization forward and all of that. Now, of course, I don’t use the for P model with anchor because I just said, right, I want to integrate and I want to customize and I want it to to use your work with when I work with my clients. So we don’t want to distract, but I wanted to draw that parallel for you as a podcast listener because there’s so much really alignment there.  

 And I didn’t see it like I remember like, Oh my goodness, look, this goes to here and this goes to here. This is all basically the same thing. So think about for you and your organization. What are some of those, whether it’s, you know, a lot of organizations have like the anchor way, the Toyota Way, the, you know, whatever it might be, the insert organization name way. So whether it’s you like kind of this operating model or it might be your guiding principles or it might be, you know, some not just core values, but like you might have your house, right? A lot of organizations have a house that they’ve done, you know, again off that Toyota house, right? Whatever it is, think about what is there already.

 Jamie: [00:38:59] What are the things that your organization has already? And are there any parallels to the four PS of leading excellence? What parallels do you think might be there for you? What do you think might be missing? What do you think you love about it? What’s the what’s the part? What’s a where it’s too much and you need to narrow if you were to narrow, where are you going to narrow? So that would be something be really interesting if you want to take this further.  

 If you listen to Dave talk about the Anchor Leader Mindset that really drives everything about how they develop leaders and how they select leaders and all of that work. So if that is their guiding anchor leader mindset, it’d be interesting if you want to think explore that for your own organization.  

 What is that for your organization? What already exists? And what do you think about what already exists? All right. So that’s it for today. Thanks for hanging in there and sticking around for the whole episode.  

 Join us next week. We continue our executive series for Q4. You’re going to hear from Kelly Ogunsanya at Stryde Community Health, and it’s a fantastic conversation. Absolutely loved every second of it, so you definitely want to tune in next week. Until then.