Leadership is lifelong learning. No one becomes a leader on day one; you have to grow into it. If you want to be a great one, then you’ll know that the process is never-ending. Diving deep into leadership in this episode, Dr. Tracey Jones sits down with Mike Ettore. Mike is the founder of Fidelis Leadership Group, where he has devoted himself to his passion for helping others develop into world-class leaders. Bringing that experience as well as his military background to the show, he offers fresh insights into the different prices of leadership he encountered along the way. Mike is also the author of Trust-Based Leader, and he gives us a peek into the book by sharing why trust plays an important role in leading. He also emphasizes the need to build the right company culture and why character should be non-negotiable. Full of great wisdom to add to your leadership resource, this conversation is a must-read! Tune in to not miss out.

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Mike Ettore - Leaders On Leadership

In this episode, our guest is the one, the only, the tremendous Mike Ettore. Mike, welcome.

Thank you so much for the invitation, Dr. Tracey. I'm pleased and thrilled to be here.

Thanks, Mike. Mike and I only just connected. I got an email from his site when I was in Israel, requesting that I be on his podcast. We're going to talk about Mike, his message, his podcast, and what he's doing for leaders at the end of the show. Of course, I agreed and after I heard all about his leadership chops, I knew I had to have him on our show.

Let me tell you a little bit about Mike. He has served in leadership roles for many years. He's earned a reputation for being an exceptionally effective leader and is known for achieving superior results in a wide range of challenging environments. In addition to having retired as a Marine Corps infantry officer and decorated combat leader, he also served successfully as the C-Suite executive in Kforce Inc. It’s a publicly traded professional services firm with annual revenue in excess of $1 billion. You’re going to get some military leadership and some C-Suite leadership.

Over the course of his Marine Corps and business careers, Mike was highly regarded for being an exceptionally effective mentor and developer of leaders. After retiring from Kforce in 2013, Mike founded Fidelis Leadership Group and has devoted himself to his greatest passion, helping others develop into world-class leaders. He has successfully coached and mentored executives and senior leaders from a wide range of industries and is sought after for his expertise in all aspects of leadership development and the creation of leadership training programs.

In addition to being a lifelong student of leadership, Mike has earned Master's degrees in Business Administration and Management. He's also the author of four books devoted to the topics of leadership and leadership development. I can't wait for our guest to hear more about this. Mike, I am truly honored.

Thank you so much. I am as well. I think you mentioned it already. This is my passion. I'm still learning, but I love leadership and I do this for the rest of my life. I help leaders develop and maximize their potential. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Leaders who say they're done and they know it all, I tell them, “You have to relinquish your leadership crown because leadership is lifelong learning,” and you absolutely know that. That's why our guests are tuning in here. Let's get right into this, Mike. My father gave a speech called The Price of Leadership many decades ago. I'm sure you as a speaker, the number one topic people are craving for training and development on is leadership.

The first price that he said that a leader has to pay is Loneliness. We've all heard the saying, “Lonely is the head that wears the crown,” but loneliness means different things to different people. Could you unpack what loneliness means for you as a leader and perhaps sometimes where you dealt with it throughout your career in the military or in the civilian sector, and some words of advisement you would give to our readers?

I've read your dad's speech, which he turned into a book and you've turned into a book. I love it. I’m a big fan of your dad. That's how I reached out to you, Dr. Tracey. I'm like, “It's got to be his daughter.” Thanks for that connection. Leadership can be lonely. How I interpret that personally and what my experience has been, if you're an effective leader, you are going to have to make decisions that not everybody is going to agree with or even see the wisdom behind your decision at first. That's when it can get lonely.

A leader at every level of experience has to hold fast to his or her courage of their convictions and to know, “I've sought your input. I've made a decision. We're going this way,” and stand firm. I'm not talking about being a dictator, but to stand firm even in the face of criticism and rolling of the eyes and all that. We've all had that and we've all done that. We've all been the follower that didn't understand the decision a leader made until later and sometimes years later. You are like, “I appreciate that gal more now than ten years ago when she was my boss.”

The courage of convictions. If you're leading well in a challenging environment, there are going to be challenges, sometimes volatile challenges, that options A, B, and C are all pretty close to each other. They all might work, but for various reasons, you as the leader decide to go a certain way and you got to stand fast. I tell people to follow their moral compass as a leader. Leaders who follow their moral compass often feel lonely, but they never feel lost. They know.

It’s that true north. I'm big on metaphors, analogies, and examples. As you know, the true north, the Earth turns, and the stars change but the true north remains in the same position. We have to have a true north and if you stick to your true north, at times, it's going to be a lonely endeavor. You have to have the courage of your convictions and hold fast because you know you're doing the right thing. It’s not necessarily the correct thing, which the HR manual says, “The right thing.” That's why we get paid the big bucks.

I was at a conference in Boeing and they said, “Decision-making is such a mark of leadership and we get paid the big bucks to make those decisions.” Somebody said, “What if there are several decisions that are all very close?” I love that you put that. I would say your mission, your North Star or your convictions do it but I love that you put, “You can be lonely, but you're not lost,” because sometimes, all you have is your convictions. I know sometimes people think, “You're in the military. You're following everybody and you're in this thing.” It even gets lonely in the military at times, does it not?

It absolutely does. They are unlike in the business world where profit is at stake and sales statistics and all that. In the military, even in a training environment, lives are at stake. In combat, nobody argues with that. Everybody knows lives are at stake. In my 24 years as a Marine, enlisted, and officer, I always found that the need to exercise moral courage, which is associated often with periods of loneliness, is more in peacetime.

It's driving my Marines hard in training. It’s so hard that they often wonder, “Why does it have to be this hard?” They never truly understand it until we get in combat and they say, “In some ways, this was easier than the training.” However, when you're pushing people hard and they're at peace and all of that, even the Marines are often like, “Do we have to run this far? Do we have to stay this hot and tired all the time?” The answer is yes, you do.

I've had times in the Marines where my first sergeant or enlisted leaders would come to me or junior officers and say, “Sir, we know you're all about combat readiness and training. We might want to let up. We're going awful hard.” Sometimes they were right and I eased up and other times, I had a different set of experiences and I'd say, “I hear you. We're going to go a little bit further.” That's where you have to be right and have the courage of your convictions.

To your point, Tracey, I wanted to go back and cover the person that asked you the thing. Sometimes, there are several different options and they all seem right. A little tidbit that I would offer on that is you have to make decisions, but whenever your team leaders or your teammates offer a suggestion that is at least as good as yours go with theirs. When in doubt, go with their solution. If your solution is A, you favor A, but they come up with B. If B will work, go with B every time. Everybody loves being listened to and our advice and recommendations acted upon. It's a golden opportunity for leaders. I couldn't pass up that opportunity to express my views on that.

I loved being listened to and even in the military but what a way to make sure that you are lonely because nobody wants to be around you. As I said, the buck stops with us. By virtue of that, when heads are on the chopping block, it's only us. That's when we stand alone but I love that at other times. You're so right about peacetime and that training for when the balloon goes up, it’s the same thing in Corporate America. I know you know this. Your reputation is built one decision at a time.

You have to always be on point and hyper-attentive too. If I have to stand and do the right thing and not the popular thing, what the profitable thing is even sometimes. I love that you put that loneliness is going to hit you every day, but when you say that, you're going to say that because in the end, there is going to be a payoff and you're going to stand firm.

I agree with that. One of the most recent examples that we both know about is COVID hit and literally, the country shut down. We're not coming to work. The remote workforce was thrust upon a whole lot of non-believers and I knew many of them. I was fortunate I embraced it early on. I believed and knew that this could work and so did many others. I'm not anything unique in that regard. I have a large following on LinkedIn. I posted almost every day. I saw people saying, “Now that we're in COVID, we're all remote. It's a great opportunity to build a company's culture.”

I opined. Ladies and gentlemen, this is just Mike Ettore's opinion. It's too late. You are entering COVID with the culture that you've already created. If you're saying, “Now we're going to go remote and we got to be good. We got to be organized. We have to have the character of accuracy and reporting.” It's too late. Can you catch up? Sure, but the old adage, “You go to war with the unit you have, not the unit you would love to have, the equipment, the training, the integrity, the SOPs, and all of that.”

“You go to war with the unit you have and not the unit you would love to have.”

Early on when you were introducing me, I'll make this editorial comment. Marine leadership and C-Suite leadership are no different. I maintained that I led civilians exactly like I led Marines with minuscule adaptation. You have that experience with the military to the business world. People are people. Many do buy off on the stereotypical Rambo and full metal jacket. They think that's how I led them. It's not like that.

In boot camp, there's a whole lot of yelling going on there. I was a drill instructor when I was enlisted. You wouldn't want to know. I called that my savage phase. Aside from that, I have never seen anything in the corporate world even close to the amount of love and compassion from leader to lead that I witnessed in the Marine Corps. I know the other services are no different. I love the Marines. I punish them and I train the hell out of them.

That is love. Rebuke is part of tough love.

I loved them and that leads to my next statement. To be a good leader, you at least have to like people and know that they're going to be bringing you problems. To be an exceptional leader, you have to love people to the point where the biggest thrill you ever get is seeing them do well and greatly eclipse your own accomplishments, which I've experienced so much now.

Develop Leaders: To be an exceptional leader, you have to love people to the point where the biggest thrill you ever get is seeing them do well and greatly eclipse your own accomplishments.

You talked about a basic premise as a leader is to know they're going to be bringing you problems. That dovetails nicely into the next Price of Leadership after loneliness which is Weariness. You not only have the responsibilities of being a leader, but you've got different people's responsibilities. You've got regulations. You're a publicly traded company, so you have global transparency in your reputation, but you then have people bringing you problems. How do you deal with weariness as a leader when you have this responsibility put on you?

I'll back up and preface it with this. I teach that there are two types of friction. External friction like COVID. We couldn't do anything about it. COVID was stressed upon us. Also, there is internal friction. Internal is often called self-imposed friction. Where I'm going with this, Tracey, is a leader who is going to get very weary very quickly if he or she has not trained and delegated to their people.

If that leader is doing 8 pounds of the 10 pounds of that unit's work, they're going to get tired very quickly. If they've learned to develop their teams and subordinate leaders, then they're maybe doing 2 pounds of it, supervising the rest of it through their leaders. It’s the classic officer, NCO delegation technique, and all of that. I'd say the first piece of advice for a leader, especially new ones, is the quicker you realize that nobody expects you to know everything. Nobody expects you to know it all. Nobody certainly expects you to do it all. The quicker you realize that and deputize your people.

I go this way. This is how I've avoided it. I develop subordinate leaders by asking the three big questions. I maintain that they produce the answers to almost all of the organization's ills. I tell my people when I first get there, “Here's the deal. You have to trust me. I trust you. We have a culture of trust here. I'll never shoot the messenger, but I'm going to ask you three questions. What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we do differently?”

If they trust you, you can sit back and they will list 99% of the issues and friction points in that organization at every level. I tell them if you're going to bring problems, you have to bring proposed solutions as well. As a C-level executive, I used to tell my leaders, and it's going to sound harsh but I'll explain it, “Bring me problems, but don't bring me your problems.”

They would look and I'd say, “Let me explain. I'm here for you. I'm here to help you. My main duty is to feed you and make you prosperous and successful. Remove challenges, give you the best equipment, and clear roadblocks. I'm here to help you solve problems. I'm not here to give you directions and advice on problems and issues that are well within your pay grade. You have to do that.”

They come to my office and I say, “I got to be honest with you. I know the answer to this or I at least have an answer for you, but this is not something that you're supposed to be coming to me for. I want you to go back and reflect. Come back to me tomorrow and bring me the proposed solutions. I'll give you my opinion on the solution, but if you're coming to me for, ‘Mike, this happened. What should I do?’”

I'm never going to do that unless you come to me and say, “Mike, I've got this situation going on. I don't know what to do. I need your advice.” My immediate response would be, “Susan, I hear you. Have you consulted your colleagues?” In other words, before you come to me, have you leveraged the knowledge, experience, insights, and recommendations within your team and across the organization with your colleagues because all of them are exponentially smarter and wiser than me?

It's a little bit of tough love. Don't darken my doorstep with a problem that is yours to solve. You have to stand firm. Getting back to the original question, it preserved my ability to develop them. It's like with you're mom and dad. Your dad, I'm sure at one point, said, “Tracey, get back out there and solve it. This is yours to solve.” I'm not dealing with children in the business world, the concept is the same.

Don't darken my doorstep with a problem that is yours to solve.

Coming into the military, we know a lot of who you are assigned. The beauty of the military is every couple of years, you get transferred so you're constantly getting a flux of new people. In Kforce, which is a bigger resource to pull from, how are you doing this as an entrepreneur with your business? The old decision-making or critical thinking is never to make a decision that you can delegate to your lieutenants… provided you have excellent lieutenants. How do you do that because a huge portion of our listenership, including law, is an entrepreneur now? I don't have a big talent full of people. Tell me how you do that with Fidelis Leadership Group.

To your point, I teach that. Don't bring me your problems and all of that. That assumes that there's a level of infrastructure there and that you have somebody to delegate to. I'll use the Kforce analogy. I was there for almost fifteen years as a C-Suite executive. My direct reports, I generally had 3 to 5 direct reports. Most of them reported to me for over ten years. Early on in the first few years, it was a lot of hands-on mentoring by Mike because they didn't know how to solve some problems.

When a problem surfaced with Don and his department, I would get Don, Dustin, Susie, and Fred all together and say, “Don has got this problem.” I turn it into a teachable moment. Over the years, they got good. I'll be honest with you, Tracey. Probably for the last 5 years of my 15 years, my biggest challenge was staying out of their way. At that point, I make a joke. My biggest value-add was getting them coffee and getting their offer early and turning the lights on. They were super good and even better. It wasn’t that they were good for me.

When I left, they all moved on to bigger and better things operating at levels greater than I've ever operated on. I'm just so thrilled for them. Early on though, I had to train them up. Entrepreneurs often don't have that full staff. It's a monetary or a budget thing and I would say, “Get enough. Get the critical stuff as soon as you can but your job as an entrepreneur is the things that you're doing in year one that are necessary. You're bootstrapping it.” If you're still doing those things with 3 employees or when you've got 33 employees, something is wrong.

That's brilliant because sometimes, we grow at different rates where we don't have 30. I love to delegate. I dream of delegation until you have the profitability that you can hire the best to start offloading this. I appreciate you saying that because I get a lot as an entrepreneur, “If you're busy, you should just hire people.” Trust me. I understand leadership and contracting government state and private. It's different when you're bootstrapping. I appreciate you sharing that because a lot of our readers are out there wondering, “How do I manage this workload?”

I love that you said if you're doing the same stuff when you had 3 as you do at 30 because that's a wonderful way to quantify it and say something is amiss. It frustrates entrepreneurs to go, “Stop doing what you're doing.” Who's going to do it? Especially if you're a solopreneur, like a lot of our readers.

If you're solo, it intends to get wider. What I say is this. Let's say the entrepreneur understands that. I'm going to hire some people and delegate. I know you'll agree with this. I tell people, “Leadership is all about humans. It’s human nature.” The minute that one person adds one other person to the equation, it now becomes a leadership situation. Entrepreneurs are usually very smart and they've got a good product. They're whip-smart in some cases. Sometimes, they boil your brain smart but I would encourage them to sit back and realize that nobody all of a sudden hit them on the head with the leadership stick and made them competent leaders.

Hiring leaders and wanting to delegate to them is noble. Being competent at it is a skill that the entrepreneur must learn and I see entrepreneurs failing to recognize that. They do the right thing. Their staff grows. They want to grow but they're terrible and inefficient leaders. That's why you see so many companies getting acquired and the first big move is the entrepreneur is gone. You can't scale leadership.

Develop Leaders: Hiring leaders and wanting to delegate to them is noble. Being competent at it is a skill that the entrepreneur must learn.

As you said at the beginning, just because you're a leader, it is different than leadership. I can be a great leader of myself, but leading others is completely different. Thank you for unpacking that. For people like me and yo, and a huge portion of our listenership is transitioning with the goal of taking all the wonderful leadership lessons they've learned. Now you're doing this. I got a gentleman and it’s his last day of working for somebody else. Now he's going off to do his own thing. He's a Marine too. I know he is going to love this.

Entrepreneurs all know that as they grow their businesses. They got to learn contracting and accounts payable. The best advice I can give you is leadership is a learned skill and you have to learn it. Mike Ettore was formally trained as a leader. As a young teenage Marine, I was first in charge of people when I was eighteen years old. I'm 66 years old now in 2023, I retired as a C-level executive at 57. I got to tell you, what I've learned from 57 to 66, I sit there every week and I'm like, “How did I not know this? How did I not see this?” The journey is never over. They have to be at least cognizant that they have to start the journey. It's a conscious decision to start their leadership journey.

Loneliness, weariness, the next topic my father talked about was Abandonment. He talked about abandonment as what you need and ought to focus on rather than what you like and want to think about. I can remember him telling me when I was a young lady. He said, “Tracey, I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than my success.” I'm looking at him like, “Are you kidding me? You're the most successful person I know.”

He's like, “No. There's so much extra stuff, non-value-added stuff in my life. Every day, you have to abandon and prune.” Can you unpack how you stay hyper-focused? In the military, we got our orders, even in the corporate world. Now, how do you abandon this stuff because you're also growing and transitioning? You're relearning and unlearning. How's this work for you, Mike?

That is a learned skill as well. I love that you are using the word prune. I use that quite a bit. When I teach executives and leaders, I say, “You have to prune the meeting tree every six months or meetings grow. You have to prune the reports tree. You have to prune.” Like a tree and a real bush, it grows and sometimes the leaves start obscure in the path.

You got to get out there with your clippers and shear them off and all of that. I would say one of the first things that a leader, especially an entrepreneur needs to know is self-awareness. Where are you spending your time? As an executive coach, Tracey, I know you do the same thing. When I go in and I coach senior executives, these are successful people by anybody's standards. I say this publicly. The first thing I do with all clients is, “Show me your schedule.” They print out the weekly schedule and they're usually very proud, “Do you see how busy I am?”

I'm like, “You are a C-level guy. That's not a C-level schedule.” They're like, “What do you mean? I am in meetings from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM. I have some at 8:00 PM.” I said, “Right, but you and 4 or 5 other C-level guys are the only people formally tasked with looking beyond this year.” The guy in the shipping dock, the IT guy, nobody else is charged formally with looking over the horizon. What's the equipment you're going to use three years from now?

Show me on the schedule where are your feet on the desk contemplating and reflecting time. Where is that? You know where I'm going next. I put them through an exercise. I want you to go through and identify which meetings you don't need to be at and which meetings you could go to every other week. I tell people to be cognizant of every single thing they do. Now I'm talking at the executive level. These guys and gals are making a lot of money and they're not paying you to do PowerPoint presentations. They're paying you for your mind, brain, influence, and presence.

It’s the same thing with entrepreneurs. I would track everything I do and can somebody else do it? If you're an entrepreneur or somebody else isn't there, you'll know that there's a certain point in time when it is time to hire that person. I coach small ascending companies that are doing well. I tell them, “It's time for you to make your two most important hires of this phase in your life cycle.”

They're all like, “What is that Mike?” I say, “You need a bonafide, full-grown bear finance person. Right now, you've got an accountant who's admirable and doing a good job, but she doesn't have the CFO-level acumen skill. You're making money. She doesn't know where to leverage the money and all. She stays beyond our skillset so you got to get a bonafide finance person.” This shocks them. “You need to get an executive assistant.” They are like, “What?” I said, “Executive assistant/ops assistant.”

From this point forward, shame on you if you and any of your leaders are banging out PowerPoint presentations, making plane reservations, or ordering lunch. These are all important tasks that need to be done and you're too good to do them. I'll describe what I'm saying so your readers truly know it. Computers were new in the Marine Corps. I only had a computer at my last duty station. I typed emails in all caps. That shift key was too much for a grunt. At Kforce, we had computers and all that.

As I joined the business world in '99, I never learned PowerPoint. I went through a fifteen-year by some people's standards highly successful C-level career, I never ever knew how to make a PowerPoint presentation. Now, I caused hundreds of them to be made, and here's what I did. I would get computer printer paper, and I would say slide one on the left. I'd draw, “I want these words. Number two, these words and these words.”

On my way into a meeting, Jessica, my executive assistant would be there. I say, “Jess, PowerPoint presentation.” This is a presentation on IT to the CEO of IT proposals. She would take it, “I got it, Mike.” She had the templates and all of that. I'd go into an hour meeting and on the way out, she'd have the first draft and it's a PowerPoint presentation printed out. I would go back to my desk, answer some emails, look at them, and say, “Change this and do that.”

On my way to the next meeting, I'd hand it back. Over the course of the day, I went from nothing to scribbling on pieces of paper to a PowerPoint presentation that was probably 90% done. Now, I could send that presentation to other people. To hold that thought, I used to tell my subordinate leaders at the highest level, “Better not let me catch you bend in keys.”

I'm okay if you go in and change happy to glad but if you're starting and creating it, and I'm seeing you traumatized over, “I can't get this font size right,” I'm going to be all over you. That's not what the corporation is paying you for. A finance guy, executive assistant, ops assistant, or whatever you want to call that person is worth their weight and gold as you know.

Develop Leaders: A finance guy, executive assistant, ops assistant, or whatever you call that person is worth their weight in gold.

The beauty for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs is they have a lot of fabulous virtual assistants now.

I was going there. Fidelis is just me and I have a VP of Ops, Nancy. She makes me look good continuously. She was a former Marine as well. She was one of my students at one point. I hired her husband into Kforce. He’s a great person. The rest of it, graphics, modules, PDFs, and bending electrons are all from Upwork. I found good people. I do a lot of book summaries for my clients.

I'm finding a book. This is a good book but I can't get executives to read a 400-page book. I especially can't ask them to do it before next week's session. What I do is I have good writers. I say, “That book right there, a 10,000-word executive summary.” They know my format. We've talked. Sure enough, a week later, it's to Mike Ettore. I pay them when I got it. I probably put four hours into it Ettore-sizing it. I send it to Nancy. I can write well, but colon and semicolon, that’s Nancy. I'm not good at that.

Nancy blesses it. She says, “It's good to go, Mike.” I go over to Upwork and format it in a PDF module. The next thing you know, we have a world-class book summary. I've outsourced everything except me looking at it and saying, “I would say it this way. I would say it that way.” I got to tell you, I have found talent on Upwork that is incredible. I'm doing well financially with the business, but it doesn't make sense for me to hire a full-time person that I'm only going to use for 3 or 4 hours a week.

I couldn't agree more and I'm so glad you brought that up because you can find wonderful people. Upwork is one that I use and Fiverr for some of my more creative stuff. Upwork is definitely on there. Loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and the last one is Vision, which Charles said, “It is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done and doing it because otherwise, you're only writing stuff down.” Talk to me about how you hone and craft your vision. How do you ignite your vision? How do you position the cast?

That's a big one for me. I trained as a Marine. There is something that goes all the way back to Clausewitz and Napoleon. The US Military has used something called The Principles of War for over 100 years and they're pretty standard among the services. If you follow these principles, the operation usually has a good chance of going well. If you violate them, you probably are not going to do all that. The very first principle of war, which I now call The Principle of Business is objective. What are you trying to accomplish? If you don't have that, you're punching in the dark. You're not going to hit anything. On a personal level and if you check my website, it has Mike Ettore. It's got my picture there and it says, “My purpose.”

If you read those 2 or 3 paragraphs, you'll know what the purpose of my life is. It's to train leaders while I'm alive and after I'm gone. Your dad is still training leaders. He is still impacting people because he left things behind. In that aspect, I am emulating your dad and other old-timers, so to speak. I'm sure he was emulating.

We all emulate Socrates, the Stoics, and the ancient guys that wrote things down because when it comes to the human condition, I find that these guys had it figured out 2,000 years ago. Probably the first leadership ever written was the Bible. If you look at it, there is not a heck of a lot of leadership situations that are not covered in that book if you apply to it. They're talking about humans back then and human nature. Hopefully, I gave you something.

The objective was what are you trying to accomplish? I love that you said the what word. We get a lot of this. “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?” If you don't know why you're showing up or why you're putting the uniform, you shouldn't have said, “What are you trying to accomplish,” because it's like a flight plan. If you can't tell me what you want to do, and you know this as a coach, I can't help you get there. Most people struggle with that because that takes a lot of introspection. That was the first principle of war. What were the other two?

There are several of them but what I'd like to reinforce is this. You're exactly right. We have something in the military called Commander's Intent. The intent is the what. To your point, nobody in a business, a company, a family, or whatever should ever wonder what the objective is. Objectives must be stated and unless you absolutely have to, a leader should refrain from stating how. Let your people come up creatively and do it.

You must state the objectives unless you have to. A leader should refrain from stating how. Let your people come up creatively and do it.

The analogy that I use in my book is it's been mandated from above that the goal for the sales force is to include top-line growth and gross profit. Go out and get us deals where there's more gross profit. The regional manager is on vacation, the office manager is sick, and the salesperson is out on a client and has a deal right in front of her. It's like, “You got to tell me if you're taking this deal right now.” She can't call her office manager. The regional guy is out but she knows the intent is to get deals that increase gross profit so she commits to the company.

When those two people come back from being sick or on vacation, they are like, “Yes.” What they don't want to do is come back and hear her say, “I had this deal, but you weren't there to give me permission.” They'd be like, “No, Sarah. Go for it.” I ask in the book and I put a little guilt trip on people, “Are your leaders, sales and non-sales, equipped or empowered to accomplish the what? Have you empowered them or are they sitting there waiting for explicit directions?”

Open the milk. Pour it into a glass. Drink it. Go wash your glass. You're not going anywhere quickly at all. I know you deal a lot with entrepreneurs. I find a lot of entrepreneurs who haven't learned leadership and the importance of delegation that when they delegate, they often delegate and dictate. They think they are training well, but what they are training is they're training robots that will respond to commands. That's bad. You want people to say, “I know what the intent or the vision.”

We're saying vision and intent. For the purpose of our discussion, it is the same thing. People should never wonder, “What is it that they want my team, my department, my region, my company? What's our goal? What's the mission? We agreed that we're going to do it this way, but that way is now on the ground level out in the sales force and the business arena. It seems like the bridge is out. We can't do it but we can still accomplish the intent by going around and skirting the issue.”

Never skirt ethics, character, or laws, but get creative. Entrepreneurs, I find, are the most creative people in figuring out needs and developing products, systems, and services, but they're often not all that attuned to engaging the creativity of their people and accomplishing the vision. It all goes back to leadership as a learned skill and everybody needs to accept the fact that they have to learn that skill.

It reminds me of my favorite Patton quote. “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Patton had it.

He was a tough man but the expectation was, “Message Garcia.” Whenever I ask people to do something and then they ask me 50 questions, I hand him a little Message to Garcia and I'm like, “Read this and you know what to do.”

To your earlier point, it was a great quote but what that implies is that the leader that he's talking to has teammates that are competent.

That's why it keeps going back to you. I think it was Patton too or one of them said, “Always delegate to lieutenants… provided you have excellent lieutenants.” I got to tell you and I'm sure everybody here who is reading, I don't want to have to write a process for, “Open the milk, get a glass, and pour it in,” yet a lot of people in the workforce now are like, “Well, well.” You have to get people with initiative too.

We can set the intent, but then we're adults. We're thinking. We have this frontal cortex. We have Google and everything. You got to have people with the initiative because if I spend every day writing down policies, I'm not too big to fail. I am not going to be in business. You got to be quick, especially for entrepreneurs. My lieutenants have to have that industriousness and enterprising. I can figure it out. Mike, this isn't rocket science. Anybody can figure this out but not if you're waiting to be told something.

I agree. The quality that you're describing as I label it is called Bias For Action. It s a big Marine Corps warfighting term. We say from the corporal all the way through the senior officer ranks, “You have to have a bias for action.” When we train for combat, we simulate real combat conditions. Real combat conditions mean, “The captain is not going to give you any instruction because the captain is dead. By the way, the radios don't work. The bridge that we are going to go across is not there.”

Those situations in combat always happen. There's a mandate. I think it might have been Patton. Somebody said, “No battle plan survives the first shot,” and it's true. You don't want a military leader out there facing that kind of uncertainty for the very first time in combat. We trained to it heavy. For example, going on nighttime raids and helicopters. It wasn't uncommon for our battalion commander to be there and surreptitiously kidnap a captain, “You come with me.”

Nobody knew the captain wasn't there. The helicopters fly away. They land, “Where the hell is the captain?” I saw that happen one time and the unit stayed there paralyzed. The captain was back in the COC. He wanted to see what the XO would say, “No, captain. I got it.” Another time, he put a unit out there. He gave us missions, but then he gave them a mission to do something. Block this bridge or something, knowing full well the bridge wasn't there.

They kept calling back for instructions and he wouldn't answer them so they just stayed there. Two other units had similar nebulous impossible missions. Despite the fact that they couldn't talk and received no instructions, they took action and did it right. He didn't chew anybody's throat out after that. He got us together. Tracey, it was continuous in that unit. I was a lieutenant. He would always throw stuff in the game to the point where I was involved in the liberation of Grenada.

I'm flying in now. It’s combat experience and flying at a low level over the ocean pre-dawn. I was the lead helicopter. I’m going to be the lead helicopter for my company. I was expecting to land in a large field, about four football fields large. I was supposed to land and go secure the Northeast corner. The rest of the company would come and then another company and we're going to start the operation. I'm ready to go. We got this plan. We got no maps because there were no maps of it. There was no real communication.

They fly us in treetops and I'm looking out of the window. It’s like an apocalypse now. I'm flying in and I see palm trees coming up. We pop over the palm trees. It starts landing and putting myself and my Marines on the side of a fenced-in soccer stadium. I'm like, “No.” It's like a shooting gallery. I go up to the crew chief and I was like, “No.” The squadron commander is a very experienced guy. I knew who he was. He turned around and said, “Go.” My first thought was, “Common on, Colonel. Not here. You're still playing with us.” My captain landed minutes later and said, “Mike, do you have any idea where you're at?”

I said, “I have no idea, sir. I don't know whether we're on the East side, the West side, the North side, or whatever.” We figured it out. We did not sit there and say, “Who's that?” That's a dramatic example but I would ask the people reading this, “Are your people sitting out there because you're at lunch and they can't talk? Are they sitting there paralyzed in that soccer stadium awaiting instruction?”

There were no instructions. I couldn't talk to anybody. The communications were out. People like us face these decisions all the time. I'm sure you had similar stuff in the military where you are tasked to do something. You generally agree that we're going to go down this route and then that route is not tenable anymore. It's up to Major Tracey and Captain Smith to figure it out.

I love that bias for action. It happens when I was out of the office for two days in St. Louis. I'm not here. My day is maxed up. I've got things going on and I love that everybody on the team has to have a bias for action. If I have to get involved, I don't want to get involved. Something is not right. We’ve been working together for years. I love that you put it. That's a great way.

For one final qualifier, we say in the Marines, “You have to have a bias for action, but that doesn't mean you run to your death. We've trained you. You know what the vision and the intent are. Use your judgment. We risk Marines’ lives. We don't gamble with Marines because gamble means they either live or they die. Risk means we might take some casualties.” Bias for action does not mean the entrepreneur just lets us people do whatever. They use judgment and they behave in a manner that still will accomplish the entrepreneurs' overall intent in their mission.

Develop Leaders: Bias for action does not mean the entrepreneur just lets people do whatever. They use judgment and behave in a manner that will still accomplish the entrepreneurs' overall intent in their mission.

I've heard it said, “You stay on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.” We're in peacetime now. I'm an entrepreneur. Nobody should be falling on their sword. We talked about loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. We're going to open this up more. Any other leadership topics we have not hit on that you want to share? That's the first thing and number two, I want to talk about these four books that you wrote. I want you to unpack them. Is there anything else from a leadership perspective that you would like to share?

I would always go back to the very first chapters of my book. It’s the very first thing that I learned as a Marine leader and a listed officer. That is the absolute non-negotiable requirement for the character. I have a famous quote on the wall of my gym here. It's by Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher. It says, “A man's character is his fate.” If you think about it, some people skate through life and they get caught cheating way at the end. Some people never do, but not most.

Most people do succumb to what their character is. Good or bad, it’s how it ends up. I tell people, “As a leader, you do not want an organization that has a zero defects mentality with one exception, character. Within character, the subset of integrity.” I was taught as a Marine leader, “We know you're going to make mistakes. You're young. However, we will tolerate no lapses of integrity. If you get caught lying, cheating, or stealing, you will be out of this outfit probably within 30 days.”

I saw it happen. Some people say, “You can't do that in the business world.” I disagree. In my company, it was a highly ethical company and that'll be a bold statement to some of the military folks out there. Kforce was led by a CEO and a team of executives that had an identical emphasis on character, integrity, honesty, accuracy, and reporting in the Marine Corps. I saw this a few times during my tenure at Kforce senior executive or the leading salesperson. This guy himself is making seven figures.

He's bringing in tons of revenue but they did something that violated our core values. The company adopted some Marine terms. We'd be in an executive team meeting and someone would say, “I have an announcement. Charlie Smith is no longer with the firm. He was proven to be guilty of a lapse of special trust and confidence and breach of integrity.”

We may never find out what exactly happened if they got caught stealing or whatever the case may be. As I always say, as goes the leader, so goes the unit always. As you know, in a publicly traded company, the auditors come in every quarter. It's the dentist thing. It used to piss me off. When I first got out there, Tracey, it is like, “The auditors are coming in. We have to bring them in. It's this SEC regulation. They have to come in to make sure that we're not lying about what the business is doing.”

It's like, “Yes, that's exactly right, Mike.” Unfortunately, in the past, people did lie. To protect the shareholders, you have to spend all this money bringing in Ernst & Young. I'm like, “I get it. I understand.” They always come in about twice a year to do a high-level audit. One of the things that they ask is about tone from the top. They ask me, “Mike, you're a senior executive. To the best of your knowledge, would the senior executives or any leader in this company tolerate cheating, stealing, obfuscation of the truth, or whatever?” I'd say, “No. I don't even suspect that going on.”

They didn't stop there. They went all the way down the chain of command, the mail room, and the shipping dock. They would cherry-pick people like Wells Fargo, “Just sign these people up.” Volkswagen, “Make the emission stats work and all that.” In those companies that are found guilty of those things, it came from the top. They either encouraged or tolerated fudging. That’s the Enron. It’s collusion.

The honor code in the military academies was, “We will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do.” I don't know if it's still there or not but the character is shared like leadership is. One of my favorite books is by John Maxwell and it's called, There's No Such Thing as "Business" Ethics. His point is ethics is ethics, be it spiritual or financial. Character is character. It's your core conviction. You can't separate it.

If your character has a malformation, it's coming out. As you said, it has no place in the organization because if the leaders at the top tolerate it, look at all this stuff going on. I can't look at what anybody else is doing. All we know is that we hold ourselves to a high level of integrity but I love the zero defect in character.

It has to be that way, especially with the entrepreneurs reading right now. I tell people, whether they realize it or not in any organization, the minute there's another person, it's a leadership environment. Whether they are consciously doing it or not, a culture is being formed. The leader has to lead by example in everything that she says, does, encourages, and tolerates. Those things produce standards. It’s like, “We can get away with this here. She tolerates that.”

Those standards become the culture. One way or the other, a company or an organization has a culture. It just may not be what the leader would hope it to be. Cultures do grow automatically, unlike a lot of people. “It won't grow around trees,” I say cultures do grow on trees. In bad cultures, the vacuum will be failed. If you don't create, groom, and cultivate a good culture, a less-than-good culture is sure to surface. It’s human nature.

In bad cultures, the vacuum will fail. A less-than-good culture will surface if you don't create, groom, and cultivate a good culture. It's human nature.

The organization is neither good nor bad. It's amoral. It's the individuals in the entity. As you said, that's all characters. That's what becomes the culture because if it's not something living or breathing, which is us, a program doesn't have a culture. Money doesn't have a culture but as individuals. I love that you unpacked that and tied culture to the character because everybody likes to say, “My culture is this and that. How's your character?”

That gets personal. That's where we get into morals, ethics, and decision-making. I can remember one time I went in, “Have you ever broken the law?” I'm a rule abider. I'm like, “Of course not.” They're like, “You never went over the speed limit or ran a stop sign?” I'm like, “Those laws.” They're like, “Yeah.” I'm like, “Okay. Yeah.” It's the little white things and I’ll go back into that character bucket. Mike, tell me and our readers about your books.

My main book is called Trust-Based Leadership: Marine Corps Leadership Concepts for Today's Business Leaders. It's a big book. It’s 574 pages. I wrote that as a textbook for my leadership and executive coaching. I do a lot of leadership training for executive teams and leaders at all levels. My earlier statement is I joined the business world in '99. I joined a publicly traded company. I didn't know what a publicly traded company was.

At one point they said, “Mike, we're going to put AP. You're going to take over AP.” I'm like, “What's AP?” I didn't know what accounts payable was. Two years in, I became the CIO. It was a 174-person technology group with a $45 million budget. It’s a failing group. I had no formal skills in tech, but I knew it was going to work because they didn't need tech skills. They needed leadership and organization. The whole premise of the book is leadership is leadership. I was new to the business world but I was not new to leadership.

I looked to my left and right very quickly and realized I've had much more formal leadership training than anybody here. There are some good executives and leaders here that are very good leaders. There are also some, through no fault of their own, that don't know the fundamentals. That's a different issue. That's a training issue but I realized I could apologize for my lack. For 4 or 5 years, I was in charge of human resources, marketing, and internet operations. I ordered cash. We are a big group. We processed $20 million a day and payables and all of that.

Most of the non-sales organization's units in a $1.3 billion company, I had training and experience in none of them. We did well because they didn't need me to be a marketer. We had people down there that had the expertise. What I was able to do was lead, synergize, make them cohesive, make sure the vision was stated, and they all were aware of it. I just lead. It’s the executive mindset versus the person turning the wrench.

My job was to make sure everybody had the right wrenches. We are turning the wrenches on the right things in every department and we were going to end up with the car we ordered at the end of the process. By the way, what kind of wrenches are we going to be using three years from now? The mechanics are too busy turning wrenches. They don't have time to do that. I'm very big on that and entrepreneurs have to be very careful about this because they don't have the bandwidth. They don't have the infrastructure.

That's the big book. If people want it, it's on Amazon. It’s Trust-Based Leadership. They can Google me. I'm all over the leadership presence. It's not meant to be read from cover to cover. You can go through and skip around and all that but it has served me admirably in my training and coaching. I also wrote one called Principles of War for Corporate America. Here's why this military operation worked or failed, and here's why GE blew it, Netflix, Blockbuster, and things like that. I make the connection.

I tell them, “If you follow these principles, you have a real good chance of being successful.” Because you're human and if you're successful, before you know it, you might fall victim to the next book, Victory Disease: How Great Nations, Armies and Companies Fail. When was the last time you saw a Sears store? You haven't. They're gone. Also, Kmart. There are so many good ones that are gone. GE is off of the Dow. You get my point. If you read the book, you got a chance to spiff up your leadership.

If you lead well and follow the principles of business, you have a chance of your operations going well but then you might get arrogant, complacent, and catch the Victory Disease. Read them all and triangulate. The fourth book, I alluded to it. I'm a huge fan of the Stoics, the ancient philosophers. They did have it figured out thousands of years ago.

I sent an eBlast out for my father. Somebody is like, “You and your father were both stoics.” I'm like, “I love that.” For the readers, what the stoic is?

There was a group of philosophers, mostly Greeks, some Romans, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, and all that. They go back from 2,500 years ago, a couple older than that to 200 or 300 AD. These are the old wise men and they figured it out. I became a fan. I was a young Marine and I saw an article on Admiral Stockdale. Admiral Stockdale had been a POW in the infamous Hanoi Hilton for seven years. He was in solitary confinement for almost seven years. They physically broke him, but they never mentally broke him.

Prior to going to Vietnam, he was a very learned guy and he became a fan of the Stoics. He said, “It was on my nightstand. I used to read it. I embraced it.” He gets shot down on the way down in his parachute. He's wounded. He's in the injection sheet going down. I'm paraphrasing, Tracey. He says something like, “Into the world of Marcus Aurelius, for at least five years. He knew I am going to get tortured.” This is not going to be fun because he’s ejected from North Vietnam. “This is going to be hell and I'm going to get through this through the teachings and the wisdom of these guys.”

He survived and I read about this. He got interviewed by a famous leadership author. He said, “Tell me Admiral, who survived the Hanoi Hilton.” He goes, “That's a little bit complicated. I can tell you who didn't survive. It’s the optimists.” The guy was like, “I expected you to say the optimist would survive.” He said, “Let me tell you why they didn't survive. We were getting brutally tortured. They broke my arms. He still couldn't walk right when he was released. They tortured the heck out of these guys. They hung them up by their arms backwards. It was brutal and inhuman. The guys that said, ‘We're going to be home by Christmas,’” and then Christmas came and went.

They are like, “Easter.” He said, “After a couple of years of that, some of them were so brokenhearted that they died.” Here's what became known as the Stockdale principle. He said, “I took a different view and I taught others this view. I would tell myself, ‘You're going to get out of this. You're going to see your wife and children again. You're going to be free again one day, but not today. Today and tomorrow, you're probably going to get tortured, starved, beaten, or whatever.’ It's there, but I'm under no illusion that it's going to happen soon.”

He said, “I had faith it was going to happen, but I also knew I got work to do. I have to live. My mission is to live to reach that. That became the Stockdale principle. I read that as a young guy and fell in love with it. I read his books and all that. The book that I wrote is called Ancient Wisdom. I have a large following on LinkedIn. For 100 days in a row, I posted a stoic quote and for what it's worth, Mike Ettore’s insights on it.

After 100 days, I took them. I packaged them in a book. I say in the preface of it, “I wrote this book for my children and my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren.” My point is, I told my kids, “If you read this book and what I say about these things, you get an inside look at how my old man's mind works. Maybe some of the things I did said caused you to do hard on yourself as children. It makes sense one day.” I'll leave it at this with the stoics.

My advice to leaders at every level with the stoics and everything is, I maintain that as an old guy now, every mistake that I've made personally, professionally, and every mistake that anybody could make as a person and as a leader has already been made countless times by millions of people, sometimes for thousands of years. All we have to do is read and talk to others and mind their experiences.

We can avoid repeating easily avoidable mistakes because when I read the Stoics, I'm like, “I wished I knew that twenty years ago in relationships, business, life, or whatever.” They've got it figured out. There's a saying, a quote, or some guidance for everything, which tells me what they went through as human beings is no different than what I'm going through. The world is much different but when you deal with people, life's problems, and getting disillusioned, they've got all the answers right there. That's pretty much it.

Now, a lot of people are like, “It's your adversity quotient.” The importance now of resiliency. One of my top ten books is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, which is very similar to, “We're in the hell of a concentration camp. You will find a way to live, otherwise, you won't make it.” Why did he make it? A lot didn't when they were under that stuff.

It’s all about perspective. I would encourage people to do hard things personally and professionally. Get used to dealing with adversity and/or challenges because eventually, you're going to have them for real. As I said about the combat Marine, the first time he gets tired, sore, scared, or whatever should not be for real. He should have felt that in training and all of that. I'm a big advocate of people pushing themselves and physically working out. I'd be curious if you're experience is the same way, Tracey. I deal with high-level executives and I don't think I've ever met one that was grossly overweight or was an alcoholic.

You got to be in fighting form in all aspects.

My executive team is all state college grads. Nobody is from a pedigree school. They are very accomplished people. They are different age groups but every single one of them exercised. Most of them, in the morning before the day started. They were disciplined at what they ate and in life. There are common denominators here that I tell people. I think your dad said it and other people said it. People that are not disciplined in their personal lives are rarely disciplined and successful in their professional lives. They go hand-in-hand.

This brings me to another one of my favorite quotes from our contrails in the Air Force. It may have been Patton again. “If you can't get them to salute when you tell them to salute or wear the clothes you tell them to wear, how are you going to get them to die for their country?” If you can't control physically something like your appetite, how are you going to be able when the pressure is on to make those big decisions? The devil is in the details.

Yes and that goes back to what I'm saying. A leader leads by example in everything she says, does, encourages, or tolerates. For example, we hit hard times during the dot-com crash in Kforce. We used to have our executive meetings on Friday and it was an all-day meeting so they would bring in lunch. It wasn't a catered lunch that GE executives probably had, but it was a catered lunch. There would be chicken, tacos, or whatever. We cut back big time in the whole company. We were telling people, “Use the back of your paper like scratch paper.” As executives, we had to lead the way. We stopped those lunches.

A leader leads by example in everything she says, does, encourages, or tolerates.

When we started again, they were just sandwiches. People asked. They would come up and ask, “Are the executives eating lunch? “They eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That's what they're eating now.” I have a thing in my book where I wanted to lead by example. We were so tight on money that I used to use these pens. The pen, if we bought them in bulk might've cost $0.87 a piece, but I made a big deal out of it for about three years.

I didn't buy new pens. I'd made Jessica buy me refills for the pens. I saved $0.25 and I told everybody that would listen. I've had this pen for three years. I've refilled it eight times. I'm leading by example. When people see the leaders, when you say, “Tighten your belts,” they damn sure better see the leader tighten your belt as well or you've set up hypocrisy and all is lost.

Mike, what's the best way for people to reach out and stay connected with you?

My website has all my contact info. I have a large following on LinkedIn. For those that don't know this, LinkedIn has turned into a world-class social media platform. There are world-class people like you in their daily sharing of insights. I have pissed that when I was young, LinkedIn and YouTube didn't exist because, between LinkedIn and YouTube, the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips.

Come find me on LinkedIn. Connect with me or follow me. You'll get every post that I make. I usually make it every day. I have the Fidelis Leadership Podcast once a week where I introduce and interviewed you, and other notables. If they Google Mike Ettore, I'm a leadership guy. I've been out there for years. They have every right to say, “I don't know if this guy is any good, but he’s been around a long time.”

You have your books and courses. Let’s say I'm not a C-Suite person, but who's your ideal client out there? We have a lot of people. Do you coach individually? Can they do online stuff? What if they're not with a bigger organization? Can they reach out to you for your services?

They can. I have a couple of executive coaching engagements right now where it's one executive from a company and another executive from another company. Those are usually six weeks at a time. Most of them sign up for another six weeks. I am doing leadership training with two leadership teams with 6 people in one company and 12 people from another. That is a ten-week leadership course using trust-based leadership.

Both of those groups are the second group from their respective companies. I did their executives first. They said, “We want you to do the next level.” One company said, “You're going to do another third level for us.” That answers the question. I train executives. I train leaders at every level and I like to get the young ones. It’s because I tell people, “If I can get to you in your 20s and 30s, you won't need an executive coach in a remedial sense when you're in your 50s and 60s. You'll need one that can help you get better, but you won't need one to save your job.” That's me being a bit of a smart ass, but reach out to me.

Right now, I don't do the online stuff yet. I'm going there. What I'm going to start doing is start opening up a quarterly class where if you want to get this trust-based leadership ten-week course, here's when it is. I'll put it on LinkedIn. I'll probably cap it at 10 or 12 people. Have the website and all that. You come, you find out, and you sign up for it. It’s like, “Here's a Zoom invitation. Let's go,” and we'll go.

I'm saying for online courses, I do online courses because everybody says, “Do online courses,” but people still want the interactive portion. You can still have the recurring stuff or study ahead, but they want that connection, especially with somebody like you. I'm not saying, “Go do it,” but I look forward to those quarterly classes. I think that would be brilliant. I need to talk to you about a couple of upcoming military gigs I got coming with you on panels and stuff like that too. Mike, is there anything else? Any parting words of wisdom?

No, I can't think of any. We talked about it a lot and love it. We've been going for a long time. You said a half hour but we've been going a lot more than a half hour but I think you love it.

I got so much written. I've got events coming up. I'm speaking and I'm like, “I'm lifting that.” I know our leaders out there will be so thankful for this. You are just a wealth of knowledge, Mike. Thank you so much.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Usually, in that ten-week course, and I've done many of them now, in the fourth session towards the end, I get all excited. I'll stop and I’ll say, “Let me ask you something.” They're all looking at me on Zoom, “Can you folks tell how much I love doing this?” “Yes.” I'm like, “I feel bad about charging you. I love this so much.”

I would do it for free. It's not free but thank you. I love doing this. This is my whole reason for being on Earth at this point in my life. Thank you for giving me another opportunity. My great-grandchildren's grandchildren are going to see this episode. Whatever the internet looks like 100 years from now, they're going to see us.

I'm so thankful because I know you are going to be a tremendous resource to our readers out there. Let me wrap it up real quick, Mike. To our readers out there, thank you for being a part of our Tremendous Tribe. If you like what you learned, please be sure and hit the subscribe button. We'd love it if you'd share.

Connect with Mike, get his books, and also the honor of a five-star review would be tremendous. I want to thank you all out there for paying the price of leadership. I think you got some insights and information here that we're in there in the battle with you. Keep up the tremendous fight and thank you all for being a part of our lives. Have a tremendous rest of the day.

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About Mike Ettore

Mike has served in leadership roles for over 45 years. He’s earned a reputation for being an exceptionally effective leader and is known for achieving superior results in a wide range of challenging environments. In addition to having retired as a Marine Corps Infantry officer and decorated combat leader, he also served successfully as a C-level executive in Kforce, Inc. (NASDAQ: KFRC), a publicly traded professional services firm with annual revenue in excess of $1 Billion.

While serving as Chief Services Officer, Mike was responsible for the majority of Kforce’s corporate support departments and functions, including Human Resources, Information Technology, the Program Management Office, Marketing and Social Media, Procurement, Corporate Real Estate, and the domestic and Manila-based Financial Shared Services teams. He also served as the executive sponsor for strategic planning and most of the logistical activities associated with the integration of acquired companies and the divestiture of organic business units.

Over the course of his Marine Corps and business careers, Mike was highly regarded for being an exceptionally effective mentor and developer of leaders. After retiring from Kforce in 2013, Mike founded Fidelis Leadership Group and has devoted himself to his greatest passion, helping others develop into World Class Leaders. He has successfully coached and mentored executives and senior leaders from a wide range of industries and is sought after for his expertise in all aspects of leadership development and the creation of leadership training programs.

In addition to being a lifelong student of leadership, Mike has earned Master’s degrees in Business Administration and Management. He is also the author of four books devoted to the topics of leadership and leadership development.