Shane Jackson: If you are going to really be focused on sustaining growing culture across a larger organization, you've got to be really intentional about it with your language, with the way you spend your time, with the way you incent people, the way that you measure success, the way that you train, the way that you hire. Because if you don't, the message gets more and more abused, and pretty soon the culture has gone on to something different than what you want. Tim Spiker: The organizational cultures that we lead are always developing, but if we want them to go in a particular direction, we have to be intentional about leading them there. Tim Spiker: I'm your host, Tim Spiker, and this is the Be Worth Following podcast, a production of the People Forward Network. On this show, we talk with exceptional leaders, thinkers, and researchers about what actually drives effective leadership across the globe and over time. Tim Spiker: You just heard from Shane Jackson, president of Jackson Healthcare. Founded in the year 2000, Jackson Healthcare now has over 1600 employees and $1.8 billion in revenues. Not only is it one of the largest healthcare staffing organizations in the United States, it also does work in healthcare search and technology. Tim Spiker: But its size and scope have not kept it from having an exceptional culture. It has won numerous Best Place to Work awards, including landing on Fortune magazine's Best Workplace for Healthcare and Biopharma for the last four consecutive years. Tim Spiker: When Shane took over day-to-day operations of the organization in 2014, he was asked point blank what Jackson Healthcare's culture was, and he didn't have an answer. That moment pushed him to define the company's culture and how he intended to develop that culture, even as the organization was quickly expanding. Tim Spiker: As our conversation unfolds, Shane shares key principles that enabled him to lead and develop the people and culture of Jackson Healthcare. He talks about how to leave room for mistakes, what it means to put others first, and spending time on teaching now in order to save time later on. Tim Spiker: Many of Shane's principles came from watching his father, the founder of Jackson Healthcare, but that wasn't his only leadership role model, so too was his high school drama teacher. Let's start by hearing about those two influential leaders in Shane's life. Shane Jackson: As I think about the leaders that have shaped me that I've learned from, the first thing that comes to mind for me is my father. He's my business partner, and I've spent most of my career getting to work with him, in addition to getting to see him as a child. Shane Jackson: And it's one of the things, I think, in my has just been such a great blessing of even in early parts of my career getting to just sit in meetings in times where I really couldn't add any value, but was able to just absorb, kind of see how he did things. Shane Jackson: I remember when we first started working together. I was mid-20s when we founded this company. And he told me, he said, "Look, I'm going to have you involved in some things that you're really not going to be able to contribute to, but I just want you to learn. I want you to learn about all these different topics, parts of the business, and that sort of thing." Shane Jackson: One other leader I would talk about that is a little bit different, but I think about sometimes is going all the way back to when I was in high school, involved in theater. And I had a director in high school who really made an impact on me. Shane Jackson: But one of the things that I didn't realize is until much later was that one of the things I picked up from him was the ability to empower people to go out and make mistakes, which is very different from the way most directors work, by the way, especially with high school actors. Typically, the director's very prescriptive. Shane Jackson: I had a very different kind of high school director. He let us go out and try things. And because of that, we didn't know there was anything we couldn't do. And so, we were able to go and do things that I think, especially back then, a lot of high school theaters wouldn't do. Shane Jackson: And I really learned a lot from that that I think later in life of giving people safe spaces where they can go and try new things and innovate and create, and knowing when you got to pull them back in, but kind of when to let them go. Tim Spiker: That's such an incredibly valuable experience, and to have had it in your high school years. I couldn't tell you the number of times talking with leaders where they have a certain set of things that they identify that they picked up from their mother or their father. And then, right on the heels of that, so oftentimes is a high school teacher, a high school sports coach, a high school director. Those people that make such big impacts on us when we're so impressionable. And what an amazing particular lesson to take from that. Tim Spiker: I want to go back to your father for just a second. You mentioned that he was actively and intentionally giving you exposure to things that you didn't have much to contribute to. So you're in the room, to quote Hamilton, you're in the room where it happens, so that's great. You're getting a chance to see how things operate. You're getting a chance to see how he operates. Tim Spiker: So what is it like? Because not everybody's had that experience with their parents where they have the parent/child relationship, but then they have a different kind of relationship. You also have a business relationship. So what were some of those things that you observed? Is there anything particular that comes to mind in that category? Shane Jackson: So one of the things I will say about my father, he's got a lot of great traits. He's a brilliant guy, but he has no formal education. Had a pretty horrible childhood, frankly. He never knew his father. His mother was an alcoholic. They just kind of hopped from one public housing to another. Shane Jackson: He ended up leaving home when he was 12 and going into the Child Protective Services and orphanages and foster homes and that sort thing. And went to college for like a semester, but then had to drop out because he couldn't afford it. So what he kind of lacked in formal schooling, though, he made up for in what most people call street smarts. Shane Jackson: And really, the way that played out for him was an incredible interest and an ability to think about and understand other people. And how that really got translated and applied is just a development of an incredible amount of ability to think about others and empathy, not sympathy, but just really digging to understand what's driving someone else. Shane Jackson: And I can't tell you how many times I have seen him talk to someone about like, "Hey, this is what I think you may be going through." And they're like, "How did you know that?" That was a skill and something that really I got to see and really try to develop for myself as well. Shane Jackson: And this idea, I think we may be talking about it later, but of thinking about others before yourself, it's not just this self-sacrificing kind of thing. It's about really, truly understanding other people and what makes them tick and what they're going through. As a leader, it's so vital. As a businessperson, just understanding what is really driving other people and the problems they're having, that sort of thing. And that's something I really learned from him and have worked really hard to develop myself. Tim Spiker: We are going to dig into that in a even more granular way here in a little bit. One followup question about your director and that experience of creating safe space to fail in. You also mentioned that occasionally somebody's going to either hit up against a guardrail or want to go outside of that safe space. So how do you discern where that guardrail needs to be? Shane Jackson: So I love that you're bringing this up. I was just having this conversation with somebody last week. This is, in my opinion, arguably the most challenging thing that you have to discern as a leader is where can I give freedom and where do I need to create boundaries? Or another way to think about this is what mistakes can I afford to let people make? Shane Jackson: And one of the things about being a leader is oftentimes you're in a position to do things better than the people you lead. Sometimes you've done it before, you've got the experience, or maybe just because from your leadership position, you have more context. You see it and all that sort of thing. And so, there's this temptation of a lot of leaders to just jump in and do it. Shane Jackson: Well, as a leader, eventually you run out of bandwidth and you got to be a leader and not a doer. And so, this idea of what do I delegate? What can I have someone else do versus what I do myself in order to build organizational capacity is a hard decision. B. Shane Jackson: Ut sometimes, either because you've got someone who is not ready from a technical standpoint, a proficiency standpoint, whatever, you have to say, "They can do this, they can't do it as well as I can," or, "They just can't do it yet," and so, the risk of them getting it wrong is too great, I need to either do it or I need to micromanage it. Shane Jackson: The challenge with that is, though, if we're doing it for them, if we're micromanaging them, they're not learning, developing the experience of doing it. And so, where is that line between it's okay if they don't do it as well as me? It's okay if they don't do it perfectly, because I need them to go through this to experience it versus, no, the risk of them doing it wrong is too great through the organization. How do you make that discernment? It's incredibly difficult. Shane Jackson: One of the lessons that I learned specifically from my high school director, and I didn't realize this until I got to college, when I got to college, and I started acting in college, and I was in rehearsal and I'm like, "I'm just going to try this scene this way." Shane Jackson: And I kind of start going. And the director comes over to me, he's like, "Nope, I want you to take three steps this way, and two steps... " And totally blocked it. And I was like, "Oh, I can't do anything except exactly what you say. Got it." Shane Jackson: Compared to high school, when we were in rehearsal, that was an exploration space because in rehearsal no one's watching. It's okay if you do something, and it just doesn't work at all because nobody saw it. That's the time to innovate and explore. Shane Jackson: And so, one of the things that we tried to do in our business is to create roles and opportunities where there's nobody watching. It's the rehearsal. And so, even people that come into our business, when we first start connecting them with customers and that sort of thing, we're going to have them talk to people that if they screw this up, it's not that big of a deal. This wasn't a good customer, or they weren't going to be our customer anyway, whatever. Tim Spiker: We had no chance. Let's give [crosstalk 00:11:05]. Shane Jackson: Yeah, we have no chance here anyway. You can't possibly make it any worse. And I tell people that come into this, I'm like, "You're going to screw so much stuff up, but I want you to get out there, and I want you to innovate and create, and just try, just do it, just get on the phone, talk to somebody. Get in front of somebody, talk to them. Because this is a safe place to do it because I want you to mess it up here, so that you learn it, so that when you get in front of an audience, and then it's for real, you had the opportunity to go through all that learning." Shane Jackson: And I think that applies throughout developing leadership. It's looking for opportunities for high potential people to give them projects that, "Hey, if this works great, if it doesn't, that's okay, I just want you to go do it to learn." Tim Spiker: What would you say to the business leader who is hearing that and says, "Okay, that all sounds awesome, but we don't have the space for somebody to fail. Everything that we're doing right now, everything that this high potential leader, for example, is evolved in is mission critical. I don't know where those it doesn't matter if they fail spaces are"? Shane Jackson: I think there's a temptation to think about the things I'm describing as having to be these formal programs. When we started and it was just a handful of people, there was no room for these kind of one-off projects just to give somebody the opportunity to develop. Shane Jackson: But if you're going to grow an organization and you're going to grow the capacity of your people, you've got to give them the ability to learn, and then go out and attempt it with the understanding that the first few times they do something, it's not going to be perfect. Shane Jackson: I tell you, the way I learned and the way we trained when we first started was, "Hey, I'm going to be on the phone with this customer. Come listen to me," or, "You know what? I got to give this presentation, just sit in the corner and listen." And then, on the way out, the car ride home, "Hey, what'd you think? When they asked this question, how would you have answered that?" Shane Jackson: And you just kind of do all those things, and then you start rehearsing the role, "Hey, you know what? Now, we got this presentation. We've got this call," whatever, put the role, "I want you to handle this part. And I'm in the room, and if you screw it up, I'll jump in. Don't worry." Tim Spiker: Yeah. Shane Jackson: I mean, that sort of... And so, I think doing that kind of it's while you're doing the work, not instead of doing the work, kind of working it in. But the principle, I think, still applies. Tim Spiker: Let's talk about 2014 a little bit. Because you shared with me a little bit that there was a bit of a, I don't know if we'd call it a switch that was flipped, but you had a transition in your thinking about leadership from being something that you were primarily pursuing intuitively, if I could put it that way, to being more purposeful and intentional in how you thought about it at the time. Tim Spiker: Take us through that transition a little bit and put some more language, if you could, to how that materialized for you and how that shifted things for you moving forward after that time. Shane Jackson: So we started the company in 2000. And over the course of the coming years, like I said, my dad founded the company and brought me in to help him do it. And fast forward to 2014, at this point, I was running our largest business unit, and we were just growing like crazy. Shane Jackson: And my dad came to me and had a conversation that I thought one day would happen, but I thought it would be much later than it was, where he said, "Hey, I've been working since I was eight. I really only want to do the things I want to do. And so, I want you to take over day-to-day operation of the company." It's like, "Oh, okay." Shane Jackson: And so, we had this transition of leadership. And we had, at that point, for years, won these Best Places to Work awards and just getting a lot of that kind of recognition for having a great place to work. So we're going through this transition, and this is a time we would talk about culture. We'd say, "Oh, culture is part of our secret sauce." And people would walk in the building and say, "I can just feel the culture here." Shane Jackson: And the business was doing very well, but I mean, this was like a matter of weeks after I had officially moved into my role running Jackson Healthcare. And I was giving a speech, and at the end of the speech, I was taking questions. I don't remember what I was speaking about. There was probably 100, 150 people there. And somebody asked this question. They said, "Hey, you guys won all these awards, and people just know what a great company you are. Can you tell us about the culture of Jackson Healthcare?" Shane Jackson: And I was stumped. I consider myself typically a fairly well-spoken person. I can talk on most topics. And I was like I didn't know what to say. And I don't remember what I said, I got through it somehow, talked about our great break rooms or something. I don't know what it was. Shane Jackson: But it really scared me, and I'll never forget driving home from that speech, and really being scared that I was going through this leadership transition of this company that was growing like crazy, that had been to a great degree culturally influenced by my father. And now, we were transitioning where he wasn't going to be as involved in the business, and how was I going to sustain much less grow and improve on this culture if I couldn't even answer a question describing what the culture was? Shane Jackson: It really set me on this journey of understanding what culture is so that I could understand what the levers were that I had as a leader to be able to influence it. That's what my book is about. So if you want to know more about that, you can go read there. But one of the key things that I learned during that was that we had been able to... And we had a great culture at that time. But if we were going to be able to scale it, it was going to take something different. Shane Jackson: What I found is that most great leaders do a lot of stuff intuitively. The way that they're thinking about people and all that, they do it intuitively. Here's the problem. I found intuition doesn't scale. If you are going to really be focused on sustaining and growing culture across a larger organization, you've got to be really intentional about it with your language, with the way you spend your time, with the way you incent people, the way that you measure success, the way that you train, the way that you hire. Shane Jackson: Because if you don't, the message gets more and more abused. And pretty soon, the culture has gone on to something different than what you want. Tim Spiker: Intuition doesn't scale. That's bumper sticker worthy right there, because, well, that's very clear, and it makes sense. I remember sitting with a younger kind of junior executive with an organization I was with at one point. And we were having a conversation about the multiplication of culture, and his response to me was, "Well, it'll just happen." Tim Spiker: I'm thinking, "Well, something will happen. I agree with that statement. I don't know that if we just leave it to hope, that it'll end up in the direction that we want it to." And I can appreciate any leaders who might be listening to this who would say, "Can't I just lead by example and have that be enough?" But to your point about scale, we need people to really be absorbing it in every way that's possible. Tim Spiker: We've gotten into culture here, and we're going to keep on going in that direction. Because, as you and I had a chance to speak offline, you made a comment about culture and subcultures, and there's this idea of alignment. And you have a thought that not all the subcultures need to be perfectly aligned, which I think is really interesting for somebody who's passionate about culture. So say a little bit about that, if you could. Shane Jackson: Yeah. It used to bother me when different groups in our organization did things differently. It was something that I struggled with for a while of saying, "Okay, this is the way that I think reviews, like individual performance reviews, ought to be done because it's the way I did them. And now, all of a sudden, I have these other 15 companies reporting to me, and they don't do it exactly the way I do it. "Well, but my way is the best way, so why wouldn't you do it that way," right? Tim Spiker: [crosstalk 00:18:59]. Shane Jackson: And I kind of went through this process of what is a preference of mine versus something that's this is really pretty serious, this is a requirement? And I've got a chapter in my book on this, but one of the things that I like to say is that principles are sacrosanct and methods are not. In other words, there are some principles there that I'm going to insist upon, as an organization, we are going to insist upon. But the way that you do that, the way that you apply it, it doesn't have to be exactly right as long as it's in line with the principles. Shane Jackson: And so, I started thinking about this kind of around culture, this idea of how do we do things? How do we relate to each other? What are the things we do, we don't do, choices we make? All that sort of thing. And I started, the analogy I thought about is actually going back to family. I've talked a lot about family here. Shane Jackson: But so I have a brother and a sister, each of them have kids. My brother and my sister, we all grew up in the same household, the same parents, heard the same lectures from our parents. And we have a kind of Jackson family culture that it's like here's things we do, we don't do. But if you go to my house and sit there for dinner versus you go over to my brother's house, it's a totally different environment. Shane Jackson: So some of those same principles, those same values that we share, we just apply them a little bit differently. It's like kind of a subculture of the bigger kind of Jackson family culture, if you will. Believe it or not, and don't let my younger brother hear me say this, but actually every now and then, he has a pretty good idea. And so, I get to see him do things and make decisions, and it's like, "Wow, I never thought of that. I want to bring that into the culture of my family." Shane Jackson: And so, I've actually kind of gone a little bit the other way where now I'm trying to create great clarity on values, some of those core beliefs we have, and say, "These are some things that we really we don't compromise on." But the way you apply that as a leader, there's room for creativity there. Shane Jackson: I'm not trying to create robots as leaders. I want dynamic, creative, innovative leaders that agree on some really important core values and principles, but then can go out and create subcultures that can kind of actually help and refine each other in addition to being high performing themselves. Not to go back to the previous topic- Tim Spiker: No, we can. Shane Jackson: I think this is such a great example of how creating clarity on values and some of these core beliefs helps you scale. And one of the key ways I think you do that is by equipping people with questions centered around your values. Shane Jackson: One of our top three values is wisdom. It's not a word you hear very much in business, but it's a very important one for us. And the reason... There's a lot of reasons I love wisdom, but one of them is because wisdom necessarily implies taking into consideration the long term. Shane Jackson: Nobody ever sees somebody and says, "Oh, wow, I'm sure that felt good in the moment, but he's going to regret that for the rest of his life. He's a really wise person." That's not it. That's not what [inaudible 00:22:10]. He's thinking about the long term. Tim Spiker: Yeah, that's right. Shane Jackson: And so, one of the things that I love is how many times I'm in a meeting, or I just hear about a meeting, and they come back and say, "We really talked about what's the thing in the long term we're going to wish we did? And that led us to this decision." And I'm like, "We won. That's it." It's equipping people with that view of how do we apply this in a way to help us make decisions about what we're going to do, and that's how you scale it. Tim Spiker: There's another one of your values called others first. Let's dig into that a little bit, and let's start with zero assumption. What does others first mean in the Jackson Healthcare world? Shane Jackson: Others first simply means thinking about others before yourself, not instead of yourself. This isn't some- Tim Spiker: Okay, that's a good distinction. Shane Jackson: Yeah. I mean, this is not like, "Woe is me. It's all about other people," and that sort of thing. It's just thinking about someone else and what do they really need? What are they thinking about? What are they motivating? What are they going through? And it's just considering that before you consider what it is that you need yourself. Tim Spiker: How do you develop something like that? Because you're talking about something that could live at the very core of who a human being is. And yet, you're saying, "Hey, this is a value that we want to have throughout the organization." What is the process for helping people take steps in that direction? Shane Jackson: So you used a good word there, the core. Your values, the things that really truly drive you, the things that when you act in accordance with them, they make you feel whole. If you act against them, you feel guilt. Those things, they're set at a pretty early age. And so, at some fundamental level, if you don't kind of resonate with these values, with this value of others first, or whatever it is, it's really hard to change them. Shane Jackson: And so, the first thing that I tell our team, if we want to get people in that really believe in others first is we have to go find people that believe in others first. Because, at some level, if there's not some kind of fundamental adherence there, we're not going to change it. Shane Jackson: And so, one of the things that we try to do is be incredibly clear on our values and really make sure people understand that before they come into the organization, hopefully before they even apply. Because what I want them to do is know that these are our values. We're super serious about them. If they don't resonate with you, you're not going to be successful here, and so don't even apply. The flip side of that is people that do really identify with some of our values, and they know about it, they're like, "I want to be here." And so, it makes recruiting easy. Shane Jackson: Now, the one thing I will say about others first, even if this sounds weird to you, like this was isn't the way you were raised, let me try to convince you that this is at minimum a superior business strategy and maybe even a great relationship strategy. And that kind of thing surprises me because people think others first, you think this is a ooey gooey relationship thing, right? Tim Spiker: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane Jackson: And it is. Really thinking about the needs of your spouse is a pretty good way to improve your marriage. Okay. But even if that doesn't sound right to you, let me make the argument from a business perspective. What most businesses do is they have a product or service, and then they go out and try to convince people that they need it. This is why salespeople are almost universally abhorred, right? Tim Spiker: Yes. Shane Jackson: This is the used car sales guy trying to get you in a car that you don't want and you don't need. But that's the way most businesses work, we design products based on what we think and what will work for the business, not work for the customer. Shane Jackson: The flip side is, if you go spend the time to understand what your customer, your target market, what are they really going through? What are the problems that they have? What's keeping them up at night? What's keeping them from being able to achieve their goals? Shane Jackson: And you understand that, and then you say, "Well, oh, I can do this to help them." Guess what? That's a way to sell a lot of business because then you are doing something for them. That's the way you should design your products. That's the way you should design your services, all that sort of thing. Shane Jackson: And so, others first, for us, people think of it as a relationship value. And it is, but it is not just that for us. It really drives our whole business strategy. Tim Spiker: I mean, you're essentially saying that this is, and you just used the word, it certainly has a human element to it, but you just used the word strategy. This is strategically effective from your perspective, is it not? Shane Jackson: Absolutely, 100%. Tim Spiker: It's really interesting how some of the best practices in thinking in life in general regarding relationships turn out to also be extremely effective strategies from a business standpoint. Because leadership is by definition, it's a relationship. It's a relationship between the leader and the leader's followers. Tim Spiker: And so healthy principles around relationship, whatever those are in terms of principle, if they're healthy for a relationship, they're going to be healthy for any relationship, including a leader and a follower at work, or as we've referenced here, within families and spouses and anywhere. Tim Spiker: And those practices create, not a word used with family very often, but they're going to create more value. They're going to create more health. And when relationships are healthy, it's very difficult to throw a problem at people that cannot be solved. Tim Spiker: Let's talk a little bit about shifts over time here. As we look at kind of the last number of decades and leadership and employment, and of course, we're in this process of COVID. And then, in the midst of that, there is this idea of the Great Resignation, and that there is a mass transition that is going on in the marketplace. Tim Spiker: So if you could, share a little bit about your thoughts about how all these dynamics are working together and how you see that impacting Jackson Healthcare. Shane Jackson: This is a big topic. I think we have seen a fundamental shift in the power structure of at least American and probably global employment. Our organizational structures, our management theories, all of that, were largely created in an industrial era where you worked at the factory in your town. And if you lost that job, you didn't eat because there wasn't anything else. Shane Jackson: So the assumption was that the boss, the managers, the people in leadership, they had authority over you, and you had to do what they said. I mean, they were paying you to do it, but you were still pretty captive. That dynamic has completely shifted for most of our workforce, where now people have extreme mobility in their ability to change jobs. Shane Jackson: I was talking to someone, and they were telling me that they got a new job. I was like, "Oh, okay, well, tell me about it." And they said, "Well, I work from home. And so I went from working with a bunch of people that I'd never met to working with another group of people that I'd never met. Basically, the only thing that changed for me is now I have to log into a new network." I was like, "Wow." Shane Jackson: The switching costs of changing jobs is zero, and everybody knows right now, to switch... I mean, everybody's getting lots of contacts, "Come work for us," whatever. I mean, it's super easy to go find out how much every job pays and, "Oh, I can switch and go do this," and all that. And so, the power dynamic has changed. And so the problem is all the things that leaders were taught, all the ways that we structured our organizations, are based on an assumption of power that does not exist anymore. Shane Jackson: And so, now you have this dynamic where people can go somewhere else, and they can make the same amount of money somewhere else. They can make more money, whatever. And so now, they're searching for higher level needs. "I want to go where I can grow, where I'm appreciated, where I can feel like I'm contributing, where I have say over my work product and my work schedule." Shane Jackson: And so, now, it's gone from, as a leader, you have to work for me in order to accomplish my purpose, now as a leader, I have to say, "We have to work together to accomplish something, including you as an individual being able to accomplish your purpose." The mindset of a leader is now, "I have to be focused on my people in accomplishing their purpose for why they work here, otherwise I can't be successful." Shane Jackson: And I think this has been going on for a while, but frankly, the pandemic accelerated it big time. You had all these people just spend all this time at home and reevaluate their life and what do I want to do? And it's more than just a paycheck. Shane Jackson: And so, I think the Great Resignation, so to speak, is really challenging for organizations that operate under the old authoritarian mindset. For those that are really able to help their people develop and accomplish their purpose, I think it's a great opportunity. Tim Spiker: It's almost like there's a sifting that's going on. If an organization has been primarily leading under this old power dynamic assumption that has at least a strong element of command and control, these are ocean liners that you can't turn around overnight. Tim Spiker: And so, if you realize what's going on right now, and if you have a larger organization, to shift the mentality quickly is going to be difficult. So let me ask you this question. Talk about how the Great Resignation has impacted Jackson Healthcare's ability to hire people and keep them with you and employed during this time. Shane Jackson: Well, I want to knock on wood when I say this, but 2021, we actually had some of the lowest turnover we've had in years. I'm so thankful for that. And I got to be honest with you, at the beginning of 2021, I wouldn't have predicted it. Shane Jackson: I think we were able to keep people, and frankly, in 2021, attract some amazing people because I think for those who identify with our values, they said, "This is the place where I can really go kind of live out my life purpose." And again, I hate to even say that out loud because we're not perfect at it. But man, it's something that motivates us to honor that for the people who have chosen to be here. Tim Spiker: What people who regularly listen to this podcast will note if they go back through the last number of podcasts over these months, what we are hearing time and time and time again from people who lead with a people first mentality, who have an understanding of how who the leader is as a person impacts the outputs and results that they produce, every single one of these organizations is not experiencing the Great Resignation to the extent that their peers are. I'm not saying they're not experiencing that at all. Shane Jackson: Sure. Tim Spiker: But I'm asking this question regularly now, and if somebody could check me on this, if they go back and listen to these last two months of episodes, they would repeatedly hear groups of people who are not experiencing the magnitude of the challenge in that space that most of the rest of the world is. And I think that is not by accident at all. Tim Spiker: So you can knock on wood. I think that there are practices and principles at play at Jackson Healthcare that are, it's really interesting how you unpack that, because for Jackson Healthcare, it's actually turning out to be an opportunity to pick up talent that has now said, "Oh, wait, I've got options. Where else can I go that would be fulfilling and exciting and a place that I want... Oh, look at Jackson Healthcare. That's a place that's getting my attention." Tim Spiker: And like a tractor, you guys suck them in, not only for your benefit and your client's benefit, but it benefits them too. So this thing becomes a strategic advantage for Jackson Healthcare to pick up talent at a time when lots of other places are losing it. Tim Spiker: All right, let's get to our last topic here, leadership development. In this cultural dynamic that we've been talking about, what does leadership development look like with Jackson Healthcare? Because you have a number of organizations that you guys hold, and there is the need to grow and develop leaders. So what is it that as the corporate entity that you take responsibility for? What gets distributed to the variety of companies? How do you look at leadership development and who's responsible for what? Shane Jackson: So, first of all, as you mentioned, I think it's helpful to understand just our structure. So Jackson Healthcare is kind of a parent company, and we have 16 different operating companies that are part of that. We really give our companies a lot of independence in the way that they operate. We don't want them to be hampered by corporate bureaucracy and that sort of thing. Shane Jackson: And so, we have to keep that in context as we think about leadership development. What we've told the companies, though, is that what we want to own at Jackson Healthcare is making sure that all of our leaders throughout all of the companies have an understanding of our values and beliefs that we think really drive the culture. Shane Jackson: And so, from a leadership development, we even have a course that all leaders throughout all the companies are required to go to. We call it our Fostering Leaders program, where we are exposing them to a lot of this. And a lot of just some of those kind of core skills of how you apply, as a leader, dealing with people and decisions and all those sorts of things. But the goal of it is to create great leaders, but it's also to create great culture that's consistent with our values and beliefs. It's really around culture. Shane Jackson: And so, as we think of about how we train, I kind of go back to if you think about how cultures are communicated. So you have a culture in your family and your national culture, regional, whatever, but in your family, there's no culture handbook. You don't have a sign on the wall that says, "Here are the things that drive... " whatever. Shane Jackson: The way that you learn how to behave in a culture, meaning the things that we do, the things we don't do, these things we do in the family, these things we don't do in the family, whatever, is through two things. The first is experience. You're just around your parents and your siblings, and you go like, "Oh, this is what we do in birthdays. And this is how we communicate." Shane Jackson: I make the joke sometimes, no one ever told a kid, "Hey, just so you know, our family, when we sit down for dinner, we like to scream at each other." No, no one told you, no one taught you that. You just sat down, and you figured out, well, if I'm going to get word in, I got to start yelling. And so, it's experience. And so, like I talked about like my dad allowed me to do, which is just sit and just be in meetings and just experience things and see how things happen. Shane Jackson: The other way that we learn culture is through what I call lore, which is really storytelling. And again, you hopefully have this in your family, like, "Hey, let me tell you a story about your grandfather when he was in the war," or, "Let me tell you this thing that happened to me when I was a kid." Shane Jackson: And it helps you gain a context for the other people in the group, especially those that came before you, of the experiences they had that led to their beliefs on certain things that show up then as practices on the things that you do and you don't do. Shane Jackson: And so, that's how we try to do our training. The formal classroom training is a whole lot of storytelling. And then, it's trying to give them experiences of trying things and whatever. But the other thing that we do is try to inculcate in our leaders an understanding that their job is to give the people that they're leading the benefit of experience and the stories to help give them the context. Shane Jackson: Years ago had lunch, it was like a skip level kind of lunch, with two great young men who had come into our organization as leaders, and they reported to different bosses. And I was kind of asking them, "Tell me about your orientation, onboarding, whatever." Shane Jackson: And one of the guys said, "I feel like I've been here for 10 years," and he had been there for like four months or something. And I was like, "Why?" And he said, "Because every day at five o'clock for my first month, I would go to my boss's office. And she would just tell me stories about, 'Oh, this happened one time with this person, and this client happened... whatever. And that's why we do this now, whatever.'" Shane Jackson: And he's like, "I feel like I know all the things that have happened over this company for the last 10 years. And I feel like I know how to just handle so many more things. And the other guy was sitting there going, "I wish my boss had done that." Shane Jackson: And so, this is also kind of back to the point earlier of if you're a small business, you may not have the ability to create a program like we have that's formal. But you know what you can do? You can sit in your office or on the phone or on Zoom or whatever at the end of the day with somebody, and you can tell them stories. Tim Spiker: All right, last thing I want touch on is a phrase that you and I had touched on previously offline and its importance in the development of leaders. And it's a really simple phrase, but I want you to share a little bit about it because I think it's a really important idea. And the phrase is this, "Let me tell you how I think about this." Say a little bit about that idea. Shane Jackson: The philosophy behind this phrase really comes from is if you think about training and teaching people, the problem is I can teach you how to handle a certain situation. You're on the phone with an upset customer, and they say this, here's what you say. Or if you run into this roadblock, here's what you do. Shane Jackson: But the problem happens is what happens when you got somebody on the phone with that customer and they ask them a question you haven't trained them on? Or what if you've got a leader who's faced with a problem, they have to make a decision, and we haven't told them, "Here's how we handled that situation before"? What do they do? Shane Jackson: I can't train you. I can, can't teach you every decision, everything that you're ever going to face that you're going to need to know. It's impossible. But what I need is for you, especially in situations when I can't be there, I need you to be able to have the skills and the knowledge of the philosophies of the beliefs that are behind the reason we do what we do, so that you can then apply it to that new situation. Shane Jackson: I was in a meeting with my executive team. This was probably last fall. And we had kind of a big thing that came up that was an executive team level decision. And they had to come to me and, "What do you want to do here?" And I said, "Before I tell you what I think we ought to do, let me tell you how I think about this," and not what I think about this, but how I think about this. What are the beliefs? What are the paradigms that I look at this through? What are the questions that I ask myself to get to the right decision? Shane Jackson: And it would've been a lot faster for me to say, "I want you to do X, Y, Z," then we could have all gone back and gone on with our days. But instead, I sat there for about 10 or 15 minutes, said, "Let me just tell you how I process this, how I think about it. And I think about this, and I like to ask myself this question." Shane Jackson: And even though it took a little more time then, guess what? I now have a team of, I guess there's like eight people in there, that understands the philosophy of the way we want to approach it. And so, now, they're better equipped to make some of those hard decisions in the future. Shane Jackson: And I really believe it's worth it, even though sometimes in a busy day it may be hard to take that extra time to explain, because you'll save it later with all the decisions they don't have to bring to you anymore. Tim Spiker: This is great. I so appreciate so many different things that you've shared here, and it's been really, really fun to have the conversation. So that people can get ahold of you or get ahold of Jackson Healthcare, or some people are thinking, "Man, I need to get a job over there tomorrow," what is the best way for them to contact you, contact the organization? Shane Jackson: First of all, we got a lot of openings right now, so- Tim Spiker: Okay. Shane Jackson: [inaudible 00:42:43] a job, please come to just jacksonhealthcare.com. We have a Careers section on the page and you can go and learn about the openings we have, a little bit more about the organization. Should be great. I'd also love to invite everyone to follow me on LinkedIn. I put out material on that. I try to get one kind of article or something like this I'm thinking about out every month. And we do some pretty neat things there. So would love to have you follow me on LinkedIn. Tim Spiker: There is a lot to take note of with what Shane Jackson had to share with us. And I want to start with a fairly basic statement that he made early on, but I think it's notable. And that is, he talked about his experience in 2014 when he was taking over day-to-day operations of the organization. And he was asked that question about culture, and he said that he was scared. Tim Spiker: The reason that I love that statement, and thank you to Shane for his transparency, but I think it underscores something important for us to keep in mind is that leaders are human. We have fears. We have concerns. We're not Superman or Superwoman. And that feels important. Tim Spiker: So if you're listening to this and you think about the organization and the people that you're leading and you feel like you should never have a doubt or a concern or have a moment of lacking confidence, I want you to think about Shane Jackson's transparency to say that here he was stepping into this very significant leadership role, and he had fears. He was scared. I think that's an important thing for all of us to keep in mind. Tim Spiker: Second, as we got further on in the conversation, we talked about a shift that's happening in the world that seems to be, relatively speaking, very much fueled by what's gone on with the pandemic, a shift in the power dynamic from the leader who holds all control around jobs to followers who have a very low switching cost going from job to job. I would articulate that as a shift from an authority dynamic to a relational dynamic. Tim Spiker: And I want to make note of something here that I think is really important for us to keep in mind. A relational dynamic has always been the more effective way to lead. That part's not actually new. It's just that the pandemic is accelerating our push globally towards a more relational perspective on leadership. Tim Spiker: You think back to the idea where somebody holds all the power just because they could manipulate or coerce because there weren't a lot of other jobs to go to or it was very difficult to go and find and then get another job, just because the dynamics were more in favor of authoritarian power previously, doesn't mean that was the better way to lead. It wasn't the better way to lead. Tim Spiker: Because as we think about leaders that we have worked for that have engaged with us relationally, those leaders always got the very best of us. They always got more out of us than the leader that relied on his or her authoritarian power in their position. Tim Spiker: And so, I'm very excited about where the pandemic is pushing the workplace. Because it is actually pushing the workplace towards a healthier and more effective version of leadership, which says that the relationship really matters and that we need to be in healthy relationships in order to maximize the results that we're producing. But let's be clear, being in healthy relationships with the people that we're leading has always been the best way for all of us to succeed over the long haul. Tim Spiker: Finally, the idea that intuition doesn't scale when it comes to culture, that we as leaders need to be intentional, that we need to put in place practices, that we need to model, that we need to recognize, that we need to reward, that we need to reinforce all of the realities of the cultures we are attempting to build, that it's not just going to be intuitively picked up, that our organizations aren't going to end up in the place we want them to be culturally if we don't take a very intentional approach to culture. Tim Spiker: And so, that leads me to the question I want to leave you with today. When it comes to the development of culture, are you relying on the intuition of others just to pick it up, or are you intentionally building and driving the culture that you are after? Tim Spiker: I'm Tim Spiker reminding you to Be Worth Following and to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you've heard something valuable today, please share our podcast with your colleagues and friends. And if you're up for it, leave us a five star review. Thanks for listening.