There's nothing that sparks leadership than when in a crisis. As a leader, you need to be resilient and the only way to build that is to face problems. Learn how to spark your tremendous leadership as Dr. Tracey Jones joins Dave Pamah of the Dave Pamah Show to talk about her newest book, SPARK. Learn how Tracey took up the Tremendous Leadership business after her father. Discover what SPARK means and how you can build leaders out of it. Know that in a time of crisis, your intrinsic drive will guide you through it. Join in on the conversation and learn how to bring the best out of yourself.
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Spark Off Your Tremendous Leadership With Dr. Tracey Jones
In this episode, I have a former Air Force officer. She has four of the Ks of leadership experience. She's written eight books and she's also President of Tremendous Leadership. Dr. Tracey Jones, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much, Dave. It's tremendous to be here.
It's very tremendous to speak to someone who's very decorated. I'm just glad that you are here. It's a great honor having you here. The audience will read why anyway. You have been in the Air Force. When was that? I speak to a lot of militaries and first responders.
I went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and got my commission in June of 1988. I was in from 1988 to 2000. I’ve got to deploy for the first Gulf War Operation, Desert Shield, Desert Storm and the Bosnian that's later than that. That's the stretch of that. I’ve got out in 2000.
How many years did you spend there?
I was in for twelve years. A lot longer than I thought. I was just going to do five to pay back my education because it was incredible but had some unbelievable deployments, some great leadership and just some wonderful places to live all over the world. I thought, "Another tour won't hurt."
Your background goes much further back than that and you've got a very well-known father in the professional and personal development world. I have studied a lot of this stuff, especially when I first joined. I was a sportsman first. I started school. I had under-diagnosed dyslexia and I was bullied a bit, and then I looked at sports as a way out coming from a poor working-class background in the middle of Central London.
Sports do track and did quite well. That was my main thing. I didn't join the fire service. It was a dream come true for me. Being more in the sports world, I looked at personal development. I was looking at Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey was a very common personal development for promotion and leadership in the fire service in London. Other big names as well. Your father is in that realm of those people around the same era as well.
My dad was Charlie "Tremendous" Jones and you are probably wondering where does Tremendous Leadership come from. He started the company back in '65. He came from a difficult background. He grew up in the deep South during the depression. He was born in 1927. There was abandonment in his family. He flunked out of school in the eighth grade.
Nobody had a job. He was the oldest of five, so he had to have jobs as a kid to make money because they didn't eat. They didn't have all this stuff that is now. He flunked out of school in the eighth grade, but that didn't stop him. He had this incredible desire to continue to develop. Regardless of the poverty, the abuse and the lack of education, his mantra was that you are going to be the same person five years from now that you are except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read. He made a living out of meeting great people, writing and reading great books.
I did listen to a lot of tapes when I was reading to these personal developments and I also looked at NLP hypnosis and a lot of it was based around sports psychology because I was doing a lot of sports coaching courses for my track and field. Also, for promotion at work and stuff like that. I say, "Personal development and fitness, everything is all keyed in."
I found out when I went to study for a degree in Politics by the time I was nearly 40 while I was still in the fire service. I have had some dyslexia because obviously, it's a bit more mega reading being done and then I realized why. I do find that if I had have known when I was at school, I would have had that rectified.
I have a sister with dyslexia and she didn't know either. She didn't like it and was insecure about it and then she got diagnosed with it. My dad, like you, found sports. My father, for him it was life insurance. It was sales because sales are about human relations, grit and not taking no for an answer. That was his way up out of what he had been born into. Same as a lot of kids at sports and for him, it was a perk. It was sales was that brought that to him.
I wished I was good at sales because, like you, I have written only one book and I had help from a motivational speaker in Arizona who had already written a couple of books. It's self-published. It was aimed at doing this and speak in a state that thinks your company promotes. I managed to get a book out of it. Let's move on to your book. Your book is called SPARK, which mine is called Firefighting From Within. It's amazing, isn't it? It's about putting out bad things that go on in your life, those fires and going within yourself to be great, which is your book. It's a similar concept. I have some similarities but yours is more on a strategic level and I can understand why, because you finished a Leadership Crisis PhD.
I’ve got my PhD and that's the highest degree. I realized at the end when I graduated, people told me that PhD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. I heard Post Hole Digger. I'm like, "I will take it all." All I know is I'm a doctor. I'm so excited. I did, and it was Crisis Leadership. In studying this, it was interesting to find out what followers ran into the building that was on fire and, which ones ran out of it? You know in the business you were in when a crisis hits, you don't all of a sudden, find it within you. It's already in you. The dissertation and the book that follows are about how you can develop this intrinsic internal hero and greatness in you so you can handle anything that's going to come your way.
That's such a fantastic coincidence as well. It looks like it's more on a strategic level. It felt like I was going back to studying politics and society again but obviously, more leadership. I had to get that academic ahead. It's not an academic book. It's a personal development book.
Tremendous Leadership: You're going to be the same person five years from now that you are today. Except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read.
I grew up with my dad, all these motivators like Og Mandino, Zig Ziglar and Norman Vincent Peale and I'm like, "This is all so touchy-feely." I'm an engineer. I'm a task-oriented person. I'm like, "Can't we get a structure? Isn't there a science to success?" Their secrets but I want the processes of procedures. The research really put a lot of the grounded theories of leadership along with real-world personality development.
It is a personal development book but the greatest books that I read are the ones that are well-researched and well-grounded. I pull a lot of different research from other areas and a lot of different books to show you. This isn't just what Tracey and her one-off found out. I could be completely wrong but it's the conglomerate of a lot of greatest research on the theory of motivation and how do we bring the best out in people. First of all, how do you bring the best out in yourself? You know as well as I do, Dave, you talk about it in Firefighting From Within and my book, the first two chapters for SPARK. It's an acronym. S and P are very tactical. That's you. A, R, K are external or strategic. You need both.
Is the SPARK follows in the five chapters? I was just looking at the five chapters and then reading the first introductory to the chapters. Bring us up to date with everything because I read a little passage in that book that spoke about how you found it. It changed things. You have delayed the manuscript a bit because of what's happening with the lockdown and the crisis with the COVID-19. Could you elaborate a bit more on that and what came with the thoughts?
It seems like there have been 4 or 5 in my life where I have gone through four years in the wilderness. The Israelites were there 40 years but 2015 to 2019 were brutal years for me. I lost a brother. I had some business ventures go south. I had some internal betrayals within my own personal team and had some family. I'm a pet rescuer and I write kids' books of my dogs. I lost my dog. My soul dog, my soul cat and my dear sweet mother at 92 passed away.
2019 was just crazy. In October, I was working on completing my dissertation and I went for my eye exam because my eyes, after four years of reading, are tired. He's like, "You have a detached retina." I had to get eye surgery. I have to lay face down. I'm like, "I’ve got to complete my dissertation. My mother’s two weeks from going to heaven," and they are like, "No. You can't do anything." All this was crazy. In the meantime, my eye healed very quickly. I was able to be with my mother before all this Coronavirus stuff. It was beautiful. She was with me and my siblings. I finished my PhD. I’ve got engaged and I’ve got married a month later.
It's like a full circle.
That's what I tell people. There are good times and there are bad times. I'm like, "I’ve just got my PhD. I’ve got married." I'm a doctor, I'm a missus. My husband had this beautiful home. I’ve got this new book coming out and this Coronavirus happened. I'm thinking, "Thank God all that nonsense happened in 2019," because I couldn't deal with it now and my heart was out dealing with that. I have looked at the book and I thought, "Has it changed?" Is developing the greatness in you only about when things are going well? Absolutely, not. Adversity is the greatest teacher of all times. The book is as-is.
This is amazing because I did write a chapter on my book, then I wrote about my brother who died in a car crash. This happened in a more spaced-out time. That was in 1998 but then when I went to study my dissertation, my mom died of breast cancer but she had it before. I expected it but it happened just before I was taking my exams.
It was a second year of studying for a degree and that was heavy enough just before I knew about my dyslexia. I said, "I want to quit now." I went from the head of my department to the Politics Department. He said, "No. You've got to carry on." I'm just thinking because I knew something is missing about me, dyslexia because some people were looking at me and thinking, "You won't make it."
My friends were there. I have always had that the against me thing. I’ve got persuaded to stay on as your supervisor did as well. "No. You've got to carry on doing it." I had this talk from sports coaches when I was going through a tough time as a kid taking out sports. "I'm motivated. I'm going to stay back in it." I did manage to pass the exams. I thought I wouldn't. The year after that, something went wrong. We had a national strike. The firefighters went on strike. The Air Force was doing the search and rescue for the firefighters when we were on strike on a picket line.
The police were in charge and went right in front of the fire engines. The military got the actual fire trucks. Something went wrong and I'm not going to go into it but it was managerial wrong for me, both from the trade union and the management with what was going on. I had to hide, and then it was causing so much stress and pressure on me because it's a national strike. It's on the news all over the country and everything. It's in the headlines. I thought, "I've got to hide." I went to my supervisor again. This is a year after my mom died. I said, "I can't do this course anymore. This is going on. It's causing too much stress."
My dissertation was based on some of the workplace politics as well, for which I was going to collect some information. That changed it as well but they said, "You've got to carry on," and I think, "No, because I don't really want to show my face and start going to classes." I'm meant to be either on the picket line but I was off sick basically and I'm not allowed to picket by trade union laws. I’ve got persuaded to stay on and did stay on. The year after that, it was my dissertation and I had to pass that to get the whole degree.
I couldn't. Someone who had dyslexia said, "I think you've got dyslexia," because I was in a group with them and they said, "Get it checked out," and I did. The college I was at was the University of London. They were great with it, they helped me and then gave me everything. I’ve got all the stuff you needed for dyslexia to get through the dissertation. I managed to pass a degree with honors. I'm proud of it. That happened in a space of three years. What is yours is condensed into one year. That's amazing.
"That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I have been through a lot. In my crisis leadership, I tell people, "I know this pandemic stinks but you have already been through SARS, MERS, Swine Flu. This isn't the first pandemic and it's not going to be the last." There are more viruses out as there are stars in the galaxy. It was just interesting that it happened. It was such high highs and low lows.
Usually, you are just slogging through it but you talked about those people helping you and in my book, the A in SPARK stands for Advocates. That is those people in your life that come alongside you that want your success more than you. They won't let you quit and if you are about to go off into the wrong area, they are going to call you on it, on your nonsense.
Pretty tenacious and will push your stuff but you can't get it right without the right people in your life in your inner circle. The R in the book is Resources. You’ve got diagnosed with dyslexia so then you found out this is what vexing me and now we can deal with it. We can get the resources we need. You can want to do something in your life but if you don't have the right people, processes and knowledge, you can't execute. That's why my book is the inner drive but the external equipment that you need to make it all happen.
Tremendous Leadership: When a crisis hits you, you don't all of a sudden find it within you. It's already in you. You can develop this intrinsic internal hero and greatness in you. So you can handle anything that comes your way.
You sounded like the senior leadership manager that's on my side, that would have been there for me when I went through that stuff. I didn't know about the stuff you told me about the crisis you went through. Having some empathy. You would have had empathy but your book comes across like that. It's a mix.
I do talk a lot. When you share personal stuff, you put it out there and it's like, "That's about writing a book," because then you are out there and people can say whatever they want about you, and it's tough. I have done some good things but the book talks a lot about my mistakes and heartache because if you think about a big crisis, it makes you humble.
There's something about being humble where you are like, "I need help," and you are open to learning. I can spot people. When I talk to people, I can tell if nothing bad has ever happened to them or they haven't ever stood up for anything. They are hollow, not empathetic and not seasoned. They are not chiseled. As a firefighter, you know iron sharpens iron. You need the tough stuff to be more resilient. I love those people that have fought the battle and get up to fight another day. That's who I want to learn from because you don’t know what life is going to bring your way.
I wrote the firefighting analogy or metaphor to bring life tools to people. Not only for firefighters but like yourself, the world out there at large, which is apparent for what's going on. Before we go onto that, your book and how it's apparent to the crisis and bring it in, joining your own personal stuff that's happened that changed the course of your dissertation, you went through some battles yourself with the Air Force. Desert storm, that's a huge thing. Tell us about your experience there and that must have added to some of that and you are a leader there as well. We know about your early life, your journey in the Air Force and your father was a big professional development person.
I tell people, there are two schools of thought. One is kids who grow up and know exactly what they want to be and then there's the rest of us that just figure it out as we go along. My dad always taught me every time you get an opportunity, just try it because you get an experience. I have had five careers. Obviously, I never landed that one job but I shared a lot of things.
I was going to school and I went to seven years of school to get my undergrad. I went to a Bible school. I went to a Wesleyan school, I went to a military school and I thought, "I like this." They are like, "Do you want to go to the Air Force Academy?" It was in New Mexico. I'm like, "I will go." I went there and all these other kids are like, "I wanted this since I was a child," and I'm like, "I’ve just got here and heard about this place."
You get those south self-doubts like, "Am I worried that it would be here?" I was there. I earned the right to be there. I went to school there for four years, got my commission and work on fighter jets. I was an aircraft maintenance officer. I was on the flight line with fire support crash recovery, all that stuff.
A commercial airline has engineers as part of the crew. There's a pilot, the captain and the engineers. It's crucial to have all those.
The flight engineer, and then you have the whole gamut of people on the ground and that's insane. The avionics, the weapons loaders, the crew chiefs, the refuelers, we orchestrated. One of the pilots brought the plane down. We took care of it and made sure it was ready to go when they needed it to go again. I am very operations-driven. I love making stuff happen. It's very exciting to me.
That's why when my dad was in sales and talking about things, I like to make things happen. I was a Second Lieutenant. I was at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and we had just heard about Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait to Iraq oil fields. I remember my colonel said, "Tracey, we are going to deploy. We are going to do it really quickly. No notice. I can't tell you where we are going. Are you in?" I was like, "I didn't go to military school for five years to not do this." You don't sit back just to, "See the world to get your education." You may be called up and your life may be in danger. I was like, "I didn't join this just to sit around." Peacetime military is not my thing. I like to be where the action is. I went over there and we went over into the Emirates.
That's not Dubai and Abu Dhabi?
It’s Abu Dhabi. We were way out in no man's land. It was incredible to see all those countries come together so cohesively. We gave Iraq a certain amount of time to get out. As a young Lieutenant, it was brilliant to see how everybody came together. It was a swift, clean war, especially because my brother was in the Vietnam era. Reflecting to that, how political that got, this is very clean.
It was bounded, we were in, we were back out and it was over quickly. As a Second Lieutenant, it was just an incredible thing to see and it ruined me for the rest of the years. I can't operate like that at all times. I have the greatest respect. They gave me such incredible leadership opportunities and I learned so much.
You had actual frontline experience, not just only the textbook stuff. You had the real stuff. Tell us about your experience on the battleground and what was going through your mind.
When we first got there, we had no idea what it was. All we heard is he was gassing everybody with nerve agents. They have little birds that tend to check this stuff out. It was nerve-wracking and it was hotter than blazes. I have never been so crazy hot. The thing about the Air Force is we stay back and then we go in. It's not like Rangers that are dropped right in there. I felt fairly comfortable that if anybody was going to come, we had our jets and we were going to go take care of business. It was scary because we had heard the Republican guard was this incredibly elite fighting force and more powerful than anybody.
You go over there and you don't know but all you know is that you took an oath to defend and support the Constitution of the US, our allies, and we were there. This is where you did not really do the gut check for us to get set up to see the logistics behind because you have to have the support. As you said, you have to have the tools. You can't fight a war unless you have food, fuel, munitions, equipment and people. I don't care how great your plans are. You've got to have things to execute.
Tremendous Leadership: Advocates are those people in your life that come alongside you, that want your success more than you. They won't let you quit. If you're about to go off into the wrong area, they're going to call you on it.
To watch the back end of it, support the fighter pilots who then went over, knocked out the command and control within 24 hours and the war was essentially over. It was absolutely so powerful for me to see. You go in, you take them out and you save who you can save. You don't just blaze everything and bomb everything so they can never use it again. It was just incredible.
We set up and they had a tent city. It's a funny story because we only had potatoes and eggs in the first three weeks and this was before the internet, phones, and all that stuff. Surround these tents and we only had potatoes and eggs. My two favorite foods are potatoes and eggs. Every day we go to the chow hall and they are like, "It's fried eggs and baked potatoes. It's poached eggs and scalloped potatoes." Every day I was like, "This is awesome. I'm the only one here that is positive about this." I'm like, "What are we going to do? At least we’ve got potatoes and eggs to eat."
The egg is the latest medical stuff. They used to say it was bad for you to eat too much cholesterol. Actually, it's good for you and it gives you a lot of vitamins and everything. It's in the fitness and nutrition world, it's not a bad thing. Potato is carbohydrates and you need that on the battleground for definite.
It was better than eating carbs. We had a lot of other countries that came in. We were this coalition of different forces. We’ve got to meet people from all different countries. We are all there together and that was cool to see our other brothers and sisters in Arms from other nations collectively get together with them and see what they are all about. See their jets and how they did stuff. It was incredible.
You had a few other operations as well and that was a big one that the whole world knew about. That added to all your experience. I wrote my book looking at my firefight experience just before I was retiring, looking at speaking and author, which didn't materialize so far. The idea of your book is probably similar when you are in a company that publishes. You are a President of a publishing company anyway.
My dad's first book Life Is Tremendous came out in 1967 and it has never gone offprint. It's sold millions of copies. The whole thing was enthusiasm makes a difference. He started the company back then. He was a publisher, speaker and wholesale distributor. Companies that would want to order books for their people to read, he would take care of doing all the logistics side of that. The goal is to get out there to maybe help other organizations that are going through a crisis and yet to get the book out there and let people know.
Not everybody grows up hearing that they have greatness within themselves. Some people think either people have told them they don't as a child. They were belittled, diminished or they are just like, "I'm not a leader so that's for other people, not for me." That's not true. The book is really for people. If you don't want to ignite the greatness within and there's a huge group of people that don't, that's okay. Everybody gets to live their own life the way they want it.
If you have this longing for something more, this book is for you to help you go, "I do have greatness within and I want to claim it." It doesn't matter, whether I'm 8 or 80. These are universal principles that you start over. I started with them young because I had people telling me when I was young, "You have excellence in you," but I was blessed to have that. Not everybody has had that. Hopefully, this will help people realize that.
For me, I naturally looked at personal development of fitness as an interest as well as maybe a little bit of politics but just sounding, looking at what was happening in the wider world. It was from when I was younger anyway.
You have that. What you talked about there, that's an intrinsic drive. The biggest thing that I tell people is personal development is you as a person. Everybody thinks, "I'm waiting for somebody else to do it for me." No. It's like, "I want to get married so I can feel loved." No. You’ve got to love yourself. Nobody can fill that hole other than you. The book is about you intrinsically had this thing that you knew, "I need to develop myself as a person." Not everybody has that. For the people that are open to it and to go, "I didn't know that I could do it," that's what this book is a tool for.
One of my latest things, I need to update my book. One of the big stigmas is mental health in the frontline military, first responders and now they are starting to wake up to PTSD and suicide. I realized that I had that towards the end of my career. Lots of things start to go wrong. I have made mistakes myself. Regardless of fitness and perseverance, I studied. It's lifelong learning. I have looked at mindfulness and stuff like that, which I'm putting in my book for the tools of life. It's stuff while I try to make the transition, while I retired. That was all a big change in my life as well. I would have to pick up your book, try and read it.
The only thing that is a big change for everyone going on globally, it's a coincidence because you studied leadership crisis before Coronavirus stuff happened in March 2020 and you had your own things that happened, a collection of it all before. When I read that paragraph where you said, "March came and this came," I'm thinking, "You've got something to tell people out there because this happened just before." Mine was a combination so it's a different thing for me. How can you put that message to everyone? Talk about the book and work.
The thing that I learned in my crisis leadership is I studied two organizations that went through. There are all different kinds of crises. There are bad crises like workplace violence or 9/11. That was horrific, a lot of natural disasters and then there's the death of founders. I had that when my mom passed away. There's intellectual death and there's a poor reputation where like the BB Exxon, where the CEO was out and didn't care about all the oil. There are a lot of all different levels. What I picked was a merger between two financial institutions that went south but then it came back. They pulled it out. Most everybody goes through mergers or acquisitions in their life. I wanted to pick something that most people do.
I did a case study. I interviewed 30 people and what I found out, my hunch was to find out, what did the leader do where you said, "A-ha, we are in this. We are going to win or that's it. I quit. I'm out of here." In a crisis, the leader can't do it all. In the day-to-day operations, the leader can pick up, can handle a lot of unengaged or disengaged followers. They shouldn't but I really wanted to look at the followers and say, "What did the leader do?"
What I found out halfway through this interview, I realized if you have followers that are intrinsically motivated and resilient, if they have a positive personality where they are optimistic and most of all, if they have been through tough things before, you talked about the loss of your brother, you talked about this going on with the strike. People that have been through that are more resilient.
Those are the people that, regardless of what the leaders did, said, "This is just a bump in the road. We are going to be okay." The flip side was that some of these people looked at this and they are like, "Big deal. It's the merger." Other people were like, "It's the end of the world as we know it," and I'm like, "My goodness, it's the same thing." Why do some of you get freaked out and others of you get completely fired up and excited?
The other group of people, I call them SOBs and it stands for Self-Oriented Behavior. They were only concerned with themselves. Am I going to lose my reputation? Am I going to have to drive further? Why do you make it? That's the thing. You think that gets you through a crisis. It's the same with this pandemic. Either you are crying about everything that you have lost or you are looking at this and saying, "We are going to come out of this stronger?" That was in you before the pandemic ever hit.
Tremendous Leadership: In a crisis, the leader can't do it all. It's up to the followers to step up. These followers should be intrinsically motivated and resilient. Those are the people that will go through the crisis.
A crisis only magnifies what's inside you. When we get squeezed, what's inside of us comes out. We are not all of a sudden, chickens and then when the bullets start flying, we are like Superman or Captain America. That's not how it works. All these things are in you or you were a chicken and you were self-serving, and then when the pandemic hits, you don't want to go back to work.
I tell people, "The people that don't want to go back to work, they probably didn't want to come to work before the pandemic." The words they were like, "Please, I just want to work. I need to work." This won't be the last crisis we go through. My book is really about finding the resiliency in yourself and then building a resilient team because you cannot get out of a crisis on your own. You need help.
It's about teamwork and I have a chapter in my book about teamwork but yours is leadership and teamwork. I didn't really put too much about leadership but it works with both because the leadership has to manage that teamwork as well, at the same for teams.
My dissertation was a study on followership. I’ve got so burned out. Halfway through my dissertation or that my leadership program I'm like, "Enough. Back off the leader." I'm so tired of everybody telling me, "I know I'm not the greatest leader in the world but I sure tried hard." When everybody says, "Tracey, every leader should be able to motivate people and bring out the best." Wrong. There are some people that you could give $1 million and they would still bite your hand.
There are some people that, no matter what, have such a negative neurotic or a neurotic personality are so broken from something that happened earlier in their life that you can't reach them. What I studied was followership because for me to be a good leader, I need great followers. You are married with kids. If you want great kids, be a better parent.
Leadership's in the home as well, isn't it? In fact, for most people that are in lockdown, there's got to be a good leader in each household that there is to be strong for the people. That's leadership.
Ninety-nine percent of people told me that they were intrinsically resilient. I'm like, "Where did you learn this?" They said, "At home. My parents taught me to be strong or they saw something go on." You need to lead your finances. You are healthy. You talk about health. This Coronavirus is hitting people with underlying health symptoms or lifestyle illnesses harder than it is. Health can keep you alive.
You have to control what comes into your mouth, body and what you eat. That's leadership. People that have debt. To be financially secure, that's leadership. We tell people, "Leadership is across the board and it's leading an excellent life. It's spiritual life, your financial life, your personal and professional." The other thing is I go into prisons, state corrections institutes, I do book discussions and you talked about leading at home. Almost all of them either came from a broken home or an absent father figure. The importance of a wonderful father in life. If you haven't had it, don't worry. My dad didn't have it. He still came out okay but that is important. We create leaders as children and adults. I'm so glad you brought that up.
You speak a lot about your research about fellowship. How has this changed your perspective on leadership?
What I realized is, I would have spent more time as a leader interviewing my followers about certain leaders that bring out the best in you. Other leaders do not bring out the best in you. That's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. I love certain followers and certain followers, I would hand over the keys to the kingdom, too. Other followers are not going to work well with me like in The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway.
I love that movie. It's finding this congruence and there's implicit leadership theory and implicit followership theory. I, as a leader, have my ideal idea of a follower and vice versa. Followers look to an ideal leader who they are looking for. Marrying those two and getting it professionally. Studying followership has helped me understand the role of finding resilient, efficacious, exemplary followers because as a leader, it's like dragging somebody on the dance floor. I can't drag your butt to work. You have to want to show up and do it. Truth is timeless. We change but the truth doesn't change. I learned later. I understood more about areas I need to work on. Hopefully, that's making me a better leader.
What concepts and leadership are constant and, which ones are changing?
I think that people are basically self-serving. It's intrinsic in our nature. I'm sorry. Look at the world. Power corrupts and that's not a religious, national or gender thing. There were enough powerful people in the world throughout history across the spectrum.
It's human behavior, isn't it? It's what happens.
If you are theologically or faith-based, there's a verse that says, "The heart of man is wicked who can know its ways." I think of myself as a good person but there are a lot in me that constantly needs to be tamped out. I would say that's universal. Understand that people are people. People will always be people. I read these motivational books from hundreds of years ago. They are dealing with the same people's issues. Lack of motivation, deceitfulness, self-orientation, narcissistic power people and con artists. That has been going on since the dawn of time.
SPARK: 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within
Understanding that and realizing, "We haven't changed that much." We have evolved in our leadership ability. I look at my followers. I don't call them followers. I call them co-leaders because if you are on my team, I want you to be my right-hand person. I want you to be my second-in-command but at a moment's notice, if I'm out for a month, I want you to be able to step in. That's where leadership is evolving into looking at the power of followership. One of my favorite books is by Robert Kelley called the Power of Followership. If you want to be a better leader, build those followers.
We are not talking about social media followers. We are just talking about you going out there and being a leader.
We want good social media followers. If you have followers on social media and they are trashing you or I had one that created a fake page of me just to talk smack, that's not a follower. There are bad followers and there are good followers. You want good followers and so people get upset. "This person said that." I'm like, "Why do you waste your time with this? They are not your tribe." I don't know what they are doing but don't try and figure it out because this is on them. There's something in them or they feel insecure like they have to attack other people to raise themselves. That's not followership. I'm talking about the good people, the good followers.
It's not only social media followers. We are talking about more than just having followers on social media. It's being a leader, isn't it? It's having followers anywhere you go.
In your friends, you need good friends that aren't going to be talking smack behind your back. You need good people that are going to tell you the truth when you need to hear it. Truth and love smack. There's an old saying, "There are only eighteen inches between a pat on the back and a kick on the rump."
At any time, sometimes, I may need a pat on the back. Other times, maybe a kick in the rear, somebody that I trust, that knows me will call me on my stuff and tell me what I need to hear. Not just what I want to hear. That's good in your life. We go into that in one of my chapters, how you find those people.
As a Leadership Crisis graduate and a PhD, Dr. Tracey Jones, what would you give out there in this leadership crisis we are in at the moment? What message and advice would you give out there to people of the world now?
I would say it's perspective. First of all, this is an unprecedented time to decide who's on your team. Seriously, don't bring people back. They don't want to be back because it's only going to get worse and I found that in my dissertation study, too. I would also say this is an incredible time to get clarity on where you want to go in your organization. In the weeks of the shutdown, I have completely attacked the things that I had been waiting to do but didn't have to want to do it. Stuff is strange and out of the chaos comes opportunity, and then the third thing is perspective. This, too, is going to pass. This is not the end of the world. I promise you. It's going to go and after all this, we are going to look at this and go, "Huh."
It stinks now but it's going to get better. Just remember that but look at something other than yourself. The worst possible thing you can do is live in fear and I'm not saying be reckless but you’ve got to be bold. The brave new world is going to require brave people. We go into harm's way. I travel all over the world and in scary places, susceptible to disease. All I do is I get my shots, I do what I can and I go into prison. I'm going to live life to the fullest.
I'm going to take as many precautions as I can but then I'm going out there because we are all going to die. I would rather die doing something I love smartly than living here. I remind people, "Worry and fear will kill you the same as the virus." It does. You can talk about stress and PTSD. Get help if you need help. Let somebody walk you through this. Some of us have been through this and are like, "I have been through 90 million things. This is just another thing." Other people, this is causing a lot of distress. Get help, talk to somebody about it because this will pass.
In a nutshell, the way around it but obviously, your book will go through a lot more that people would want to hear on a wider scale. Not only just dealing with pandemics and things like that but life in general.
The other thing is, you talked about knowledge and the K in SPARK is Knowledge. Do you know how many wonderful, informative things they are all online from actual molecular and virus scientists talking about what's going on that really talk about where it came from, what happened, what we are doing. That this is going on in the past and this is what you can do.
Stop listening to the media and the nonsense. I stopped listening to the news in May of 2014 and I am harder now. There's so much YouTube and peer-reviewed. Even now, some doctors are doing research, studies on passing and what happened. Don't read the hype. It's not true. It's just going to scare you. If you care about knowing what's going on, I watched two Zoom calls between different colleges about what they are finding. It's fascinating. Don't be fearful. Be educated.
It's mainly things like texts and what's on the social media feeds and some of the newspapers that want to sell something. They just put what they want. Generally, you see some even on Fox News but if you’ve got the actual person who comes talking to you, you are the person that wants to hear what Tracey Jones is saying. Not some newspaper that's giving a second-hand thing and then twisted it, giving fake news. As you said, someone's put a fake profile of you. In some ways, broadcasters, look at where it's coming from. Look at who's talking and if it's the actual person, you can take it.
In SPARK, the K stands for Knowledge. I put it in there. If you can't cite it, don't write it. I tell people, "Cite me or bite me." People tell me, "Tracey, did you hear this?" I'm like, "Where did you hear that from? Stop it. Don't you tell me that nonsense? Stop repeating that crap. Don't say that." It's not on one side of the politics. It's everywhere. Somebody sent me an email and it supposedly came from this person in the hospital. I go and I research it and I'm like, "This is absolutely false."
There are lots of dodgy emails going around, especially those scammy ones. Tracey, where can people find your book when it does come out and all the other great stuff you are doing?
On our website, TremendousLeadership.com. Also, on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, there's a crisis leadership series where I break down 10 to 15-minute little podcasts about how you build resilient teams to come out of this pandemic. You can email me, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, please connect. You can sign up for our news blasts, our eBlasts, and you will get a coupon code. You get three free eBooks and then you will find out exactly when the new book is coming out and we are doing a series Ladies on Leadership. We are doing SPARK or we are going to be doing shows. That's why you should sign up. Subscribe to our email list or send me a note.
Dr. Tracey Jones, thanks for coming on the show and talking to me.
It was a pleasure. It was wonderful talking with you. Thank you so much.