Episode 81 – Leon Drennan – Leaders On Leadership
Leaders tend to have calendars and journals chocking with goals and reminders, and there is little to no time to accomplish everything. Despite this rigid monitoring, almost nothing is getting done because of unfocused efforts, and that's why leaders should remember that less is more. Dr. Tracey Jones discusses this with the Founder of Vision Leadership Foundation, Leon Drennan, who believes that concentrating first on the things that must be done immediately can help streamline a rather bulky workload. If every leader learns how to do this, they can manage their members well, work closely with them, and have extra time to appreciate their hard work and celebrate even the smallest victories.
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Leon Drennan – Leaders On Leadership
Our guest is Leon Drennan. Leon is a proven leader who has spent years in the constantly changing world of for-profit healthcare. Years ago, Leon left and founded the Vision Leadership Foundation where he continues to encourage coach, and mentor business leaders. You're not going to want to miss this incredible perspective on the price of leadership from Leon who has extensive experience in the for-profit and the nonprofit world.
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My special guest is Leon Drennan. Leon has years of proven leadership in the constantly changing world of for-profit healthcare. Leon has spent much of his career leading people and designing organizations to create good work for his teams, what every leader should do. Leon has operated at the Senior Executive level at HCA, overseeing an array of functions during his tenure. These include physician services, staffing, design, construction, engineering, real estate, corporate services, revenue integrity, and internal audit.
He developed a leadership platform for generations of audit staff inside a highly complex business engine that generated opportunities inside and outside the company for many of their executives. In addition to Leon's position as Founder and Vice President of Vision Leadership Foundation, Leon mentors and coaches business leaders and serves on the Board of Directors at the FCA Venture Capital Partners. Leon, we are honored to have a leader of your expertise and your grounding here on our show.
Thank you. It's good to be with you.
You're welcome. You've been in the healthcare industry for many years, correct?
Yes. I left the corporate structure years ago and started the Vision Leadership Foundation. Since then, I've worked with a variety of different kinds of businesses, industries, churches, and nonprofits.
Can you tell me what the Vision Leadership Foundation is? What is your work there?
Our foundation is set up simply to train and develop leaders of all types to the next level. I will deal with any type of leader that the Lord leads me to. My emphasis is more on Christian leaders, people in the marketplace, in nonprofits, or in churches that are trying to make a difference from a Christian perspective.
You're going to give us your leadership perspective on the price in a for-profit world. We also have the blessing of having somebody with the nonprofit leadership background to it. I'm anticipating there will be a lot of crossover between the two worlds.
There is. In my writings and teachings, an organization is an organization. The rules and principles are the same in profit and nonprofit. In the profit, you're trying to squeeze out the profit. In the nonprofit, your P&L objective is zero. It takes talent to manage to zero like it does to manage to 15%. There are some special dynamics in the church that are different, but then a great number of the principles still work the same, even in church organizations.
I love how you put that. My father wrote a little booklet called The Price of Leadership. I transcribed it from a speech called The Price of Leadership which is one of the top speeches that he gave throughout his career. He was a phenomenal leader, a man of faith, but he realized that if you want to step into leadership and wearing the mantle, there's going to be a price you're going to have to pay. I'm sure you would echo that sentiment, Leon. The first one he talked about, the price of leadership was loneliness. We always hear this is lonely at the top. You believe the Bible so we see Jesus at different parts throughout his ministry was lonely. Can you share with me what loneliness means to you as a leader and where you experienced it in your career? How would you combat it or what would you recommend to our readers that are leaders?
Less Is More: Positive stress gives you energy, while the negative stresses you out emotionally and mentally.
Loneliness is nobody else understands what's going on with me. You don't have a comrade appear. You may have a friend or mate. I have a wonderful mate that’s loving and understanding but you run into things later that your mate can’t understand. You run into things as a leader that your best friend can't understand. I ran into things as a leader that nobody else could understand. I work in a large corporation.
One part of my career was in the internal audit department. I lead it before Enron and WorldCom. We had the misfortune of a big federal audit. Part of the time, we were under gag orders as senior leaders and not to talk about it, even doing a good job about it. There is one lead auditor in a company that has a lot of CEOs, president, and some group presidents but nobody that exactly appear to the Senior VP of internal audit. I had nobody to talk to. At times, I wasn't even allowed to talk to people. I’m familiar with loneliness.
The next thing that he talked about was weariness. His point was that whenever you're doing something worthwhile, it's going to take a lot out of you. You're going to have people that are doing more and people that are doing less. Even if you're dialed in with your passion, there's still a weariness that follows that. Can you walk us through what that means for you as a leader?
There's weariness from hard work. I started out on the farm. I worked hard all day. I slept well at night. If you go on to the corporate world, work hard, leave it all out there that day, you go home, and sleep well. There's a difference between hard work and striving. Striving is where you're trying to make something happen if that doesn't happen. You feel accountable for everybody and everything. You've got an attitude beyond, “I'm going to go in and do my best. I work for the glory of God and try to help people.”
You have to make something happen. As you all know, there are times when you can't make things happen. That is what takes weariness to new levels. Jeff Fisher, the former coach of the Titans, is my best friend. He says there's positive stress and negative stress. Positive stress gives you energy. It energizes you during the day. It may leave you tired at the end of the day but it doesn't wear you out emotionally and mentally. Negative stress wears you emotionally and mentally, and that's what kills you. Most major diseases come from a negative type of stress.
I love that you said that we have to make things happen but there are times when you can't. You and I know what our faith, it's because God's timing hasn't happened yet or there's something else that needs to get done first. I love that between hard work versus striving because everybody following this show is a hard worker. My dad used to say, “You can be miserable miserable or happy miserable.” Life is tough but it's how you carry that burden.
In the latter part of my career, when I was leading a physician services organization, that interfaced with everything all across the company, every group, every division. In every hospital, physician services had its thumb in the operations pie. The one thing is we were held accountable for making certain things happen. On the other hand, we were told a lot about what we could or couldn't do. Coming to grips with what we could control was huge.
I remember when I first went there, people were working long hours and they were saying, “We can't.” I had to turn that discussion around and say, “I understand what you can't do. What can we do? What is the most important thing to do?” I changed the rules. I said, “I don't want 10 to 12 hours a day out of you. I believe in going the extra mile. Let's work nine-hour days on high priority things on what we can do and then I make a prediction.”
If we do it well then we’re going to be allowed to do more. Over the course of three years, we changed the landscape dramatically because we simply focused on what we could do that was helpful and that was a high priority. It was like farming. On the farm, there was always another weed to pull or a cow to milk. In physician services, we could work sixteen hours a day or more, and it’s still never been done. Cutting back the time and focusing on what we had control over. One of the things you had to coach people on the most is to let go of what you can't control, impact what you can, and be satisfied with it.
That is good for leaders and that goes right into the next point of abandonment. For weariness, you need to abandon the non-revenue generating things. Sometimes, less is more. What does that mean to you? How do you stay focused on that? A lot of times we think we're busy but not all work is created equal.
Less Is More: If you're going from one goal to the next rapidly, you won't have time to breathe or celebrate.
You have a quote in one of the chapters in my book, 20/20 Leadership. It's titled Less Is More. One of my mantras for years has been, “Less is more.” If you focus on a few high priority activities and do those, you're going to accomplish more over the long haul. I'm helping a brain health company. I'm coaching the executive leadership team. I had a discussion with one of the guys, “You're busy but you’re busy being busy. We're not making a difference unless we're serving people and helping people get better. What are you doing today is more on the next day? Focus on that.”
My whole thing is staying focused on priorities. I set long-term priorities. I set goals for a year that evaluate myself and the entire team quarterly. I picked that up from Lee Iacocca. One of the things he focused on was evaluating people quarterly. I would do that every day. At the end of the day, I’d have my to-do list and then I'll have my priority list, my projects. I would put them in order and then I would put a red star by the top three. The next morning, I would go in and do the same thing just in case I see something different. I focus on the priorities.
If somebody is doing an ice sculpture of an eagle, what they will tell you is, “I look at this block of ice and I cut away everything that doesn’t look like an eagle.” When I help people and coach people, I look at everything that was being explained and everything that’s being done. Everything that we're not focused on serving somebody, making their life better, and generating a fair price for that, I cut away. It's incredible how much money gets wasted in for-profit businesses, nonprofit organizations, and others that I've dealt with.
A lot of people were saying shutdown this pandemic. It has been a beautiful pause for people to get clarity on, “What do I need to do?” It's all hands on deck. I cannot waste one penny on something that's non-value-added. We can ministry ourselves right out of business if we don't watch it.
My lesson that the pandemic taught some people came a few years ago when I had a battle with cancer. I had to have surgery. I came back to work after a couple of weeks, two hours at a time, I went 4, 6, then 8. I found that my real sweet spot was about 2 to 4 hours as a leader. I’m doing leadership type of things that impacted the future of the organization. The rest of the time was administrative stuff. If I could have stayed longer, I might have been okay because I didn't have to go to all the meetings and do what I fell feeding the bureaucratic beast.
Lord knows how I feel about bureaucracy too. It's a necessary evil. That's a great insight as a leader to know. What do you do? Do you work to farm that out? There's a certain element of the technical stuff that we need to get done. I love how you got clarity on 2 to 4 hours is your sweet spot for drilling.
If you're part of a larger organization, you have to feed the beast. You call it the necessary evil. I was the beast to the rest of my organization. I ran $1 billion organization inside a $30 billion organization. I had a beast I fed and I was the beast to a bunch of other people that were feeding us at the top. Every year, we started with a clear set of goals for the organization. Usually, 5 to 7. I wouldn't let anybody set more than seven. I would cascade those goals down to my leadership team. I would look at those goals and the incentives down to three levels of the organization so that I knew that we were aligned. I would look at it with my direct reports every quarter. Where are we?
One of the main reasons for looking at stuff every quarter wasn't to be looking over their shoulder because I hire good people that accomplish the result. They were self-sufficient to a degree. Sometimes, I needed to know where the barriers were to know if I needed a volunteer jumping in. I wanted to know where to help them and what we need to drill out. The main thing was I needed to brag on them. I'm one of those type-A folks. My psychological guru on personality profiles, once he evaluated me, he said, “Leon, one of your challenges is you're going from one goal to the next and you don't take time to celebrate.”
He says, “You’ve got a good environment here. People aren’t afraid. They're not looking over their shoulder. They're working hard. You need to celebrate some of what you accomplish.” I took that to heart. Every quarter, at least, I didn't go more than 90 days without recognizing the efforts of my key leaders, bragging on them, and telling them how much I appreciated them for the job they were doing. I ask them how I could help them. I ask them what I needed to do differently or better. If I had coaching tips for them, I would share that. I would share it in the context of, “I appreciate what you're doing.”
For a lot of leaders out here, we're hard-chargers. We're far looking in the future and that is a great point, stop and celebrate. Abandonment, I love that. The fourth price he talked about was vision. His perspective on vision was simply seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Leon, back a little bit to the other point. I know you said you were a $30 billion beast. Here's your billion-dollar beast and then other people.
Less Is More: If your vision is not clear enough to make some people mad, it's not clear enough.
I've worked in bureaucracies for about twenty years. For the last twelve, I've been a bureaucracy of a little small entrepreneurial company. Did you work for structure? One of the things that I always struggled with when I was in the bureaucratic machine was they'd set the goals or where we needed to go but it would seem to change and there would be competing priorities. Did you guys stay good as an organization? Were you able to up flow that back? I'm sure the healthcare industry would change even within the quarter. How do you handle that as a leader? What would you advise?
In the ideal world, you plan the next year, a year in advance, and the last quarter. You go in with a clear set of goals and you focus on them. Particularly in physician services, we have changed because it was tough financially one quarter to hiring physicians and doing more contracts. We were cutting contracts we had set before. We had to deal with that. The way I kept it in perspective is I’d tell the team, “I know this is frustrating to do these and do these, but here's where the company is. They're intelligent folks, they've made these decisions, and we need to salute the flag on this.”
The good thing was in physician services, we had some of our core stuff. We developed other initiatives over time. I always had AN incubator of projects. While we would salute the flag on the stuff that impacted the P&L the most, we were always doing something else that would add value to the company in the future. We had latitude to do that. It wasn't high-cost stuff and it wasn't highly visible until it got highly important. It helped me keep my sanity and helped keep the team motivated to have some of those things that we had control over while dealing with the request and demand the rest of the company that changes directions for us.
Thank you for answering that because things are going to change. Some people are lower in the scale of openness to change. I love how you pitched it that way. They're smart. They're doing this for us. They're not willy-nilly and saying I want to jerk people around. We have to go but we still can control a lot of the future. When it comes to P&L, we do have to all salute because it's not our company. They're paying us. We need to do that. Thank you for that, Leon. What does vision mean to you? How do you get clarity? How do you grow your vision?
First of all, vision is a picture of a better future. We're sitting out in the sun having a team meeting and the leader says, “Let's go over there under that shade tree and out of the sun. There’s supposed to be a light shower later. We'll be protected from the rain. By the way, we'll have some apples off that tree versus sitting out here in the sun.” That's an oversimplified example of vision. It's 30 minutes in the future but it's still vision. Leaders cast a vision of something that's better in the future than in the current. As a leader, you say, “Here's our vision,” and you get to buy into that. What are the priorities needed to be to accomplish that vision to take this five-year vision? You establish those as a team and then you cast down those priorities to the various team players according to their abilities and passions. Everybody works together to move the ball.
The way you said that is simple because then you find out right away if everybody views this as a better future. You might find out that some people are entrenched in the way it was before. This is personal or it's a sacred cow to them and that's okay. At that point, the sooner you know, they may view that it’s not better and that's everybody's prerogative, but at least you know then to say, “Can I cast this in a way that you do see it? Do you not want to go where the organization is going?”
Bill Hybels, the big church in Chicago, “If your vision is not clear enough to make some people mad, it's not clear enough.” You get clarity on, “We're going this way. Here's what we want to do.” If you don't want to do that, if you can't find a role in this that makes you happy, that doesn't make you a bad person. That doesn't mean we can't be friends. It doesn't mean we can't stay in contact. It means that you need to help me and I need to help you land in a spot that lines up with what you care about.
That is absolute brilliant, Leon. We let that stuff fester and it starts to metastasize. It doesn't go away. It doesn't get any better until you honestly look at each other. That takes the leader and the follower to be honest with one another.
In terms of getting clarity of vision, oftentimes, I get clarity in prayer when I get quiet. One thing I learned a long time ago, there is a God and I'm not Him. He knows the future and I don't. If I want to know the future, I need to ask. There's wisdom in many counselors. I ask other people. When I went into the physician services, my experience with physician services was my annual physical which I never looked forward to. There were experts there that I listened to and they had the answers. They talked about a lot of things, but when you boil it down, there were a few key priorities that we needed to focus on.
Companies often do SWOT analysis as a routine planning function. SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. If you do that, do that well, and take the output from it, that brings great clarity on what you need to be doing. What are our opportunities? Which one is the best to pursue? What are our threats? What do we need to do to defend ourselves? What are our weaknesses? We don't need to build on weaknesses but we need to build on our strengths. You get a great deal of clarity when you go through that basic planning function.
If God knows the future, why don't you ask Him? You have said many incredible leadership things in these succinct ways. I love this. You are a seasoned leader. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you would like to share with our guests, which are leaders at all levels that want to be better leaders?
Less Is More: You don't need to build on weaknesses. Build on your strengths instead.
I'll go back to this impact of priorities. Broadly, there are four management functions. There are management functions and leadership functions but even a management function can look at it through the leadership lens. There's a big difference between a manager and a leader. A manager directs and controls people in the task. A leader inspires with vision, they guide with priorities, they empower through goals. For accountability, they encourage coaching and correct. They measure and share feedback for the progress. A huge difference between a manager and a leader.
Let's take the four management activities which are planning, organization, communication directing people, and then control. I learned a long time ago that there are three of those functions that drive 80% of the results and only take 20% of the time. The three things that you spend 20%, 30% of your time on that drive 80% of the results are your plan, your organization or your people, and your control system. Communicating and directing only needed a whole lot if you have an untrained or unqualified team.
I've got a client and I say there are two things. I was consulted for it. I said, “If you let me impact two things in your organization, I'll move to a foreign country and I'll have more influence over than you will.” They said, “How would you do that?” I said, “Let me influence the priorities and let me have the control system, the accountability system, and I’ll impact where the organization goes.” A lot of leaders lose sight of that or lose that in the fog. It's that complicated and that simple.
That's what's beautiful about coming back to the core truths. I love that you go back to the processes, the strategy, the construct, the diagnostics. In leadership, there's this esoteric, it's more art than science, but it also is a lot of science.
In my first book, Good King, Bad King, I started out with the five things that make a successful organization, teamwork, and career for an individual. In the five things are purpose, why am I here? That speaks to your mission and your vision and then people. Who cares about this mission, vision, and who can contribute? There’s priorities, what do we need to do that's important to achieve the mission and the vision? There's power, how do we empower people to help?
Moses wasn’t a good leader when he started. Jethro came along, the father-in-law says, “What you’re doing is not good. You can wear yourself out and other people too.” He told Moses how to empower people. We empower people and then engage all of their creativity and all their energy. A person's creativity and energy are a great deal. It is lost when you're managing versus when you're leading. The fifth component is progress. How do you set people up to make progress? You’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have a change methodology. You've got to document and train. You've got to have a control system. Jack Welch of GE says, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” You get better through measuring, providing feedback, and seeing what's working.
Can you unpack one of those statements? It struck me because I know it, I felt it. Sometimes, like you, you say things and I'm like, “That's exactly what I was experiencing.” Managing versus leading, that's when you lose your energy. Can you unpack that and explain that so our leaders out there understand this?
Managers are trying to get somebody to do something they want done. I talk to managers and I was like, “How do I get people to do this?” They wind up, “How do I make people to do this?” My pastor says, “If you ask the wrong question, you're going to get the wrong answer.” I said, “We're asking all the wrong questions here.” If you're having to push, shove, force, coerce, you're managing and you're not leading. A leader, by contrast, is clear about the vision and priorities. They’re looking for somebody that has the aptitude, the skill, and the motivation or the passion to do something that contributes to the vision and priorities. When they empower them through a pre-agreed set of goals and hold them to account or recognize them, brag them and reward them for achieving those goals. If the goals are set right, you're making progress, and you're sharing that, you have a highly motivated team that is not being coerced and people will say, “I get to be part of this. This is exciting,” versus, “I have to do this.”
When you're hiring, a lot of people hire for, “Can they do this job for this amount of pay?” They're what I call the five P’s of hiring. You should look at the purpose. What was this person created to be and to do? Everybody is unique. We're put in a certain time and place in history under God’s sovereignty to do something that only we can do. I read that people spend 80% of their time doing something that somebody else can do. When I'm taking on classes, I say, “If anybody else can do this, you hire them. I'll play with my grandkids. If I'm the only person that can do it, then I'll talk to you.”
What were you created for? Your personality, what are you uniquely hardwired for? I see many people put in positions that they're set up for failure from the outset because their hardwiring doesn't match that position. You have purpose, personality, and then you have passion. What do I care deeply about? You might have the personality profile to be a good nurse executive. If you're the nurse executive that lost a teenage son to a quality control air in a hospital, you have a different level of passion around your position than somebody else equally qualified. What is your passion and what’s your preparation? We tend to look at college and etc. My pastor would say that his main qualification for being a pastor was not seminary but working in his family-owned business and learning how to deal with the public.
Less Is More: A manager controls people and tasks. A leader inspires with vision.
The final thing is potential. Can you grow in this position in this organization? Do you, as an individual, want growth or something steadier? Does the organization need you to grow in this realm? I'm looking at all five things. I've heard and said, “People are too quick to hire and too slow to release somebody when it didn't work out.” You spend a whole lot of time on the front end and getting the right person in the right position, then you don't spend nearly as much time dealing with folks that don't fit and how to release them, and etc.
Leon, you did me the solid of sending me all your books that you've referenced. Where can our readers reach out to you, contact you, or pick up this wisdom that you're sharing? I'm sure they would love to get the books that you have written and poured more of your wisdom into.
All of my books are available on Amazon. They’re also available through the Christian resource center LifeLight. They also distribute all my books.
How do they reach out to you, Leon? What's the best way to get in contact with you?
They can contact me through LinkedIn. They can contact me through the foundation, Vision-Leadership.com. They can call me at (615) 260-5685.
Thank you, Leon.
If they call me and then I'll answer the phone, which I don't tend to answer the phone if I don't recognize the number, they should leave a message and say, “I'm so-and-so. I'm calling about Vision Leadership Foundation. I want to talk to you about this.” If I get that message then I will call them back usually the same day. If I get a call and no message or I can’t identify the person, I don't even pick it up.
Leon, I can't thank you enough for what you shared with our Leaders on Leadership. I thank you for your insights. The fact that you've written books to continue to share your insight and on all the things because you've got decades of experience. I appreciate your heart for leadership and what you've taught me and all the leaders reading.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome. For our readers, please be sure to subscribe to the Tremendous Leadership channel and reach out to Leon. Pick up his book. If you get his book, leave him a rating on Amazon because that will show everybody else how tremendous it is. To all our leaders out there, I want to thank you so much for reading. Leave us the honor of a five-star rating wherever you listen to the Tremendous Leadership podcast. Thank you so much and have a tremendous day.