– Welcome everybody to today’s podcast, Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today, Tom Connolly. Tom is an experienced leader, a strategist and a change agent with proven performance, leading, building, fixing organizations by creating a culture of performance. And Tom, that does not do justice to who you are and what you have done. Tom comes out of the Naval Academy. He has a long family tradition of being in military. Both his parents served in World War II, his daughter continues that legacy and is serving with the Navy as well today. He has had 30 years of experience building teams and looking at how do you excel in performance when really your job is life and death. You either do it right or somebody suffers some severe consequences. So Tom, you are very involved in working in developing leadership, and you’ve done it with small groups. You’ve done it in groups up 3,500, probably in more. You’ve done it with smaller budgets, big budgets, two and a half billion or more. You have insights that you have developed as a result of that, and you have published a book, “Becoming a Leader: A Road Map for My Daughter and the Aspiring Leader”. What a gift to your daughter. So if you would just start please by telling us your journey, how did you get here? Why the book? What is it you’re passionate about? And what is it that you would like our audience to know?

– Well, thank you, Lois. Thanks for having me on today, and thanks for what you’re doing here, reaching out to leaders and helping people. This is what I’ve been doing for a long time, and it’s my mission. But, you’ve given me a mouthful, I can tell you a very long story and our time would run out. So, and you’re gonna have to cut me off at some point, because I will keep talking.

– I will do that .

– But you know, I grew up, you referenced my mom and dad were both veterans. You know, they were both children at the depression, we were, there were six of us in the family. My dad was a career Navy, chief petty officer, master chief petty officer, started in World War II on Peleliu with the marines, and he stayed for 30 years. And he… He and my mom were a great team. My dad would took all of us, he had four boys and two girls, and he took the four boys aside at one point and said, somewhere around the seventh grade where were spread pretty far apart, and he said, “so, listen, I’ll take care of you while you’re here. But if you wanna go on, you wanna go to college, you are gonna have to make your way. And so you need to do well in school, scouts, sports and church.” And I said, “okay, so school scouts, sports and church.” That’s where our focuses were. And we didn’t move a lot when I was young, but my… My dad and mom moved a lot when my brothers and sisters were young, and, and we became a very tight knit group. And my dad was deployed, my mom was chronically ill with asthma and she died when I was 12, but my brothers and sisters ran the house pretty much, and they became my mentors. And my dad was the icon, my mom was the while she was around, she was the patriot, and my brothers mentored me and my dad was the icon, this is the example. And so I grew up and by the time I was, by the time I was seven years old, I could cook and clean and so on, and sew a machine, and I knew how to do a lot of things. And my dad would always say, you know, give it 110%, whatever you do, give it 110%. So by the time I was thinking about high school, college, et cetera, I was looking at my brothers and two of them had gone to the Naval Academy, one was a marine officer having gone through an ROTC, and I said, you know, I wanna be like those guys. I’d been following him around my whole life, playing baseball, whatever it was, in scouts and all those things, and so I knew what the path was. My dad used to say, “you know by the time you left for the Naval Academy son, you had spent 17 years as a seaman apprentice.” The word apprentice strikes a note, and I didn’t really realize what that meant until I really started writing this book. So, but what had happened was I had been apprenticed into the idea of leadership. All of these things, my dad would say, “you know, whatever you do, you’re going to lead.” And so I saw where my brothers went. I saw what they wanted to be and do, and I thought, you know, I wanna do that. So I went off to the Naval Academy, but at the Naval Academy, I realized that hard work wasn’t enough. I needed to learn how to work smarter too. And, but what I really identified was this cycle of study, action, reflection and refinement. And I said, you know, because everything you do in the military that becomes a standard, wherever you go, you go into a new job. You’re standing on a new set of a yellow footprints in front of a new platoon or a new battalion or whatever it is, a new desk job, and you don’t know that job until you’re in it. You know what it’s supposed to be, you know what it might look like, you know how it was maybe in somewhere else where you did it, but every organization has its own life cycle, its own culture, and that’s just true in the civilian industry, it’s also true in the marine Corps. And so there’s some people might call them micro-cultures, but every organization has its own life, its own heartbeat. And so here I am at the Naval Academy and I’m learning this. I get out in front of my first group of marines and I look at them, and I realize, I don’t know, as much as I thought I did. And this cycle becomes one of how quickly can you make it? How quickly can you do these things to learn from your mistakes so that you can move forward. So if you’re doing those things and you’re learning these things, you cannot learn them all from a book. You can’t. No book, my book, anybody else’s book is going to make you a great leader or just make you a leader. There’s a lot of people who put different definitions on, a transformational leader, transcendent leader, whatever it is, I just say a leader, because I think a leader is someone who helps their people to achieve. Fundamentally he or she uses the tools they have, the actions they have to cause their people to transcend to something greater than themselves. So you’re, you got to stand there and you go, you know what, this isn’t about me, it’s about them. And so, but you’re learning these things at a cyclic rate, very, very quickly. And sometimes it’s very, you know, very small things. But when you look around, you say, how do I get there? How do I get the right solution? Well, in the marine Corps, you’re very fortunate, you have all kinds of people senior to you and staff NCOs and noncommissioned officers that are, have been around longer than you, and they know what right is, and they’re doing right. And so you look around, you go, you know what I need to follow them, I need to ask them, I need to find out that answer. And you realize maybe when you’re 50 some odd years old, and you’re write a book that you’re being apprenticed. You’re an apprentice. Now you’re somebody’s master leader. Someone who is just coming there after you’ve had some experience. But you also are always have somebody to look to and say, that’s what I should be doing, that’s who I need to be. So as a leader, your purpose is to help your people to achieve and bring the organization forward. But at the same time, you’re in this apprenticeship for life, for as long as you’re gonna do this, if you’ve committed to the idea of being a leader, you’re gonna always be an apprentice, ’cause there’s always someone to learn from. There’s always someone who’s better than you. And there’s always someone that is looking to you. So you’re a master and an apprentice at the same time. So here I was a young lieutenant, not knowing all those things, but I had great leaders around me and great people that understood these things. And so I said, you know, I’m gonna do it, what they’re doing. And sometimes you’d go, you know what, I can do that better. I know this is better, I’ll do that. And sometimes you look up and you go, wow, I don’t wanna be like that guy. And okay, let’s remember that. Don’t do that. So it’s a continual apprentice. And I think leadership is an apprenticed vocation. There’s so many nuances to leadership. Every, like I said, every organization, every industry, every place that you’d go if you’ve committed to the idea of being a leader, you’re in a little different situation, you have to adapt. You have to be what the organization needs. You cannot be the same leader in every organization or every place. And so it becomes very interesting. And as I moved up, you know, I gave, was given other opportunities to command and do other things besides the artillery, and those were great opportunities. And unfortunately, you know, in 2001, when I was standing in the Pentagon, you know, somebody’s flew an airplane into my office space. And so I said, you know what, now is not the time to leave. And so I stayed around until they told me I couldn’t play anymore. So, you know, that happens, you get statutory limitations. And so here I am. I said, where can I do this? I got out, I went to work for some people for a couple of years, couple of great companies, kept find myself, kept finding myself in the same place of building teams, helping people figure out their organizational dynamics, helping young leaders to do things, I said, you know, I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna start my own business here and see if I can help people to improve their performance personally, professionally, spiritually, and physically, see where that goes. And so here I am.

– You said something really interesting, and that is, or you said a lot of things that are interesting, but one is that leader isn’t going to be necessarily the same in every organization. You have to adapt, change, shift ’cause the organization will be different. Speak to that a little bit, because I think we tend to think that there’s the set of criteria once we accomplish that, we’ve arrived in a sense. But I love your example about always apprenticing and looking at the breathing organism of the organization and adapting. So if you would speak a little bit to that, if that requires a lot of skill and humility.

– Oh, humility is critical. And you know, anybody who’s ever been in a stressful situation or in the type of job that requires you to continually review what you need to do. I mean, standing in Iraq with my marines every day, I had to look in the mirror and say, did we get the results we’re looking for? Did we do what we needed to do? Do we need to take a step back? And you had to continually evaluate this. You can’t do that if you’re not humble. So, but to your point, Lois, great question. You know, we come back to these things. So, specifically, when we’re looking at the… this apprenticeship, et cetera, or developing these characteristics, there’s you, and then there’s the organization. And so, you know, you have… Who you are, you have to know, you have to know what you believe, you have to know what your underpinnings are. I don’t believe that you change your character with every job that you have, you can’t do that. You have to know what you believe, what’s your basis is, what are your highest values in life? What are those things that drive you forward and not only drive you forward, but cause you to make rational decisions and evaluate where you are at any time in the day or any situation that occurs. You know, sometimes you’re offered a position and that position is counter to what your highest values are. If you’re, you know, if you’re gonna take a job that you know is going to be, is gonna be counterproductive to your family, and your family is your highest value, then don’t take that job. You know, now that would all be in the circumstances of all the things that support that. God I love my wife, she has followed me around for 27 years, and, you know, fantastic woman, a nurse, and you know, but you know, we had to… We had to understand where those things played out. But there are times when you go, you know what, I’m not gonna take that position because whatever it was. When we decided to go to Okinawa, I said, you know, “what do you think?” She said, “let’s go someplace where we can take the kids and they can enjoy life overseas someplace.” And that was an opportunity to go do that. But so there’s you, and there’s all that you believe and who you are, your character, that character can be plugged in anywhere. It is how you go about leading that has to take into account what your organization is and what the circumstances are that surround that organization. It could be your strategy, it could be your dynamics of how you’re organized, it could be a whole plethora of things. And so when you’re a leader going into look at something like that, you always get to look at say, what, are we being successful? If we are then what are we doing right. And then, okay, where can we improve? ‘Cause if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards. And so you gotta look at it, if you’re not being successful then maybe your hands are more full. What are we doing wrong? What do we know that’s wrong? But, you’re conducting an analysis of that organization every time you walk into it, every time you walk into a new job, whatever it is, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? What’s my mission? How am I organized to do this? Who are my people? How do they perform? Are those all the right people for those right things, but as a leader… So that’s a competency thing, right? That’s being competent. But this being competent, not just as a leader, you also have to know something about your industry and something about the company and something about those people. You have to get to know those facts and those people, to understand what it is you need to do. And so, you know, some organizations or some situations may require you to be more hands on leader, at least until you can get the organization to a point where you’re not doing those things anymore, other people are doing those, you can delegate more conceivably. You may walk into an organization that has been highly successful, why would you wanna mess with success? But you need to look at those things. And then of course, you also wanna, you know, if you’re developing a culture and organization there, you need to bring your people in and say, and they’re the ones that are answering your questions, what are we doing right? What are you doing wrong? There’s, I’ve had many… A mentor who said, you know, “the leadership is in the questions that you ask.” You know, so if you ask good questions, you’ll get good answers. If you ask bad questions, you get bad answers. You know, we used to have a saying on recruiting duty, you know, if you ask for contracts, you’ll get contracts. If you ask for new recruits, you’ll get new recruits. If you ask for phone calls, you’ll get phone calls, right? So that means the recruiter will spend all this time making phone calls, not thinking about, or trying to bring in a new recruit. So the question is, what is it that you want? And what are you trying to create? And those are the questions that you have to ask, but it always, I think comes back down to what’s your mission and what is your organization and your organizational dynamics, the people, how you’re structured, and how they do business. There are some times it’s processes, but so you have to have developed these two pieces as a leader, you to develop your character fundamentally, and you have to develop that in, on top of that, those leadership, tenants and ideas that you take forward, no matter where you go, those are your, you know, integrity, things like integrity and ethical conduct, and those kinds of things are fundamental, they don’t change when you go to someplace else. But you also have to be competent in whatever it is you do. If you’re a CPA, then you highly competent as a CPA. If you’re in the IT industry, you obviously need to know about IT, and how those things and how your industry works. So you have to develop both of these things. You can’t ignore one or the other. And, you know, we’ve always, we’ve all heard the issues of, you know, you got the great leader who’s very dynamic and bold, and can go do whatever it is, but he doesn’t know anything about the organization, right? And you don’t get a good result out of that. You know, at the same time, you can have someone who’s extremely, technically knowledgeable and knows everything about it, but has terrible people skills and is, you know, or maybe he doesn’t have any ethical or moral basis. And therefore is continually changing his position on a variety of things, always with the idea that your purpose is to bring your people forward and improve the organization. And leaders don’t get to choose what kind of leader they are. They get to choose who they are, but they don’t get to choose what kind of leader they are. If they choose the job, they have to be that person.

– So they have to choose to be the leader that’s needed for that situation is what your–

– Exactly, exactly.

– Yeah. Which is what makes leadership difficult because there isn’t tech cookie cutter.

– Correct. And there’s lots of books that have been written and people, you know, look at me sometimes and go, “wow, there’s a lot of great people talking about leadership out there.” And I said, “great, fantastic. I’m not in competition with any of them.” I don’t worry about that because they’re… They may fit very much what an organization needs or a person needs at that time. Because once again, fundamental principles of mine teach something every day, learn something every day. You have to be continually looking to improve. So all of these different nuances in leadership are real. You know, I wrote this book, it’s only a hundred pages long, right, because I started off writing it and I kept having to cut myself back going, you know, this is gonna be like 4,000 pages long and I’m never gonna finish it, and that’s not really what my daughter needs, or an aspiring leader. They need something that says, Hey, what are the basics? Where do I start? How do I begin this journey forward? And how do I learn these things? And so it was, you know, it’s like writing a long letter, right? And I mean, was it Lincoln that said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one,” some, and I might be misquoting that, but nonetheless, it’s the same thing. You try to try to write a short book. It’s not… It wasn’t easy from that standpoint. But it was very much aimed at that first level because every level there are, or thereafter, you know, builds on the previous one. And it’s a little bit different, you know, if you have a thousand people, that’s a little different job than 50 or five.

– I concur with you so much on that, because I think we talk about leadership in general terms. And we don’t talk about the stages of leadership development. And there is a process and it’s a maturation process, but it’s also a discovery of who you are, it doesn’t happen overnight. And that is probably the hardest is that discovery of self.

– That, and that is where I think it’s most important. I see, I heard somebody say the other day, and it might have been on one of your podcasts that everybody needs a coach. And I think that’s completely true now. Not just because I’m in the industry, in fact, I didn’t start off thinking I was gonna be a coach to anybody, but the idea that, you know, it goes back to that apprentice vocation, someone who can show you what right looks like, and someone who is the example of how you get from here to there. Someone that says, Hey, you know, you need to work on this. You know, you need to work on your writing skills. You need to be better at this technically, you need to think about that from a standpoint of what your values are. These are things that, you know, a master, your mentor at the time can show you. And every one of these guys and a guy that you have to get, you know, or a girl that you go up and say, I want you to be my mentor. You know, maybe not, maybe they’re just your boss and you’re looking at them and going, wow, you’re really good, I just wanna do what you’re doing.

– I love it, yup.

– Right.

– You talk about sometimes leading and managing, guiding performance in peace time being more difficult than during crises. Wanna speak on that a little bit.

– Yeah, you know, I had never really thought about…. And that’s a great question and I appreciate it. I had never really thought about that question until somebody asked me because I’ve led marines in Iceland, and in Northern Norway and overseas and in combat a couple of times and so, but when you’re in those places where you have a crisis, everybody kinda knows what the crisis is. Or you have a challenge. Everybody knows we have to take care of that, whether that’s the enemy over there. So when you say here’s the mission, everybody has a kind of a common understanding and a motivation to take care of that because there’s a threat. And so leading in that situation is, it comes down to your technical skills in what you do, right? If it’s a financial problem then your guys that are really smart in finance are going to be leading your show or helping you lead that show. If it’s a , you know a, if its a military problem, then it becomes one of tactics and techniques and procedures doing it, what you’re trained to do. And that may be the case, but every day leadership in especially in peacetime is much more nuanced. Everybody has a need for leadership. And if you have an organization that everybody works in a cubicle, those people aren’t staying… There’s not 50 people standing out in front of you, or 500 or 1,000. They’re not standing out in front of you everyday saying, go that way, you know, or here’s the mission. Their mission is to do whatever their part is of that company or that organization. And that’s what they’re doing every day. And, they have to be motivated. They have to be given opportunities to achieve. They have to be shown where the mission goes. And that is much, that requires much more energy from the leader to tell you the truth. You know, when you’re, when I was a lieutenant, captain, et cetera, you had a formation three times a day, you had one in the morning and one at noon and one in the afternoon, and this is where we’re going, this is what we’re doing today, here’s how we’re going, let’s go do it. And that’s great, that’s easy. That’s easy or easier. I mean, you still have the… You still have the idea that you have to take care of all these people. But when you’re working in an office or in a spread out area, doing routine tasks every day, it’s very mundane, and it requires people to understand how important they are, where they’re going, what is the outcome? What happens if they don’t do what they should do? How do they move forward? They still need to know that you care. I say, I talk about something in my book called going the extra mile. And going the extra mile is about taking care of your people. You know, would you bring them coffee in the middle of the night when they’re standing post, you know, observing the other side of the berm for insurgence, if you do, you just won their loyalty forever conceivably, right? And so likewise, if one of your employees is having a problem at home or in their personal life or in their work life, or in some aspect of their daily routine, do you care enough to listen, to help? Are you willing to expose yourself enough to the idea that you have to have a relationship with these people. You have to develop a relationship with every one of them, much harder to do in the mundane. Well, when you’re out in the dirt and you’re, you know, you’re living in a crisis someplace, and you’re all sharing that space together, those are relationships that run very, very deep. You know, veterans take care of veterans. And I used to tell my marines, you know, “listen, when you get home, stay in touch with your buddies, because nobody saw the same war that you saw. What you saw was right here, and the guy sitting next to you saw pretty close to the same thing. But the guys that come a year from now or were somewhere else, they didn’t see it exactly the same way. So continue to share those relationships. Those are things that are strong, and help you to deal with some of those things.” But it’s true in the civilian world as well.

– People are everything, aren’t they? Tom, we have, this has been fascinating. And our time has gone really, really fast, last thoughts that you wanna leave with the audience, things that we haven’t covered that you’re passionate about, that you think are so important. Please share your wisdom.

– I would just summarize here and say that leaders must be what their organization needs. You have to make a commitment to it. You know, being a leader is a commitment to a lifestyle, to the way you’re going to do business. Yes you have to be technically competent in your industry, but you have to be the person and that causes your people to want to achieve, to move forward. And that means that you have to be what the organization needs, what your people need, not who you wanna be. And that’s the tough part. That’s the tough part.

– It is the tough part and I think the other part that you spoke about that I think is so beautiful is that leadership is an apprenticed vocation. It’s really, you have to keep learning. You have to keep growing and you never arrive, not as long as you’re breathing.

– No, ma’am, you get up every day, but that’s why I say get up every day, teach something every day, learn something every day and you will continue to move forward. Then you can be competent and go the extra mile and own the mission, and those things will cause you to be successful.

– Thank you so much for your time today. And those of you who are listening to Building my Legacy Podcast, thank you for listening to us. We will have information about Tom in the show notes. And if you want further information, please feel free to reach out to us, we’ll be glad to connect.

– Thank you Lois, it has been a great honor and a pleasure to talk with you today and to your listeners.

– Thank you.