Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.112)
Hey guys, on this episode I have with me Jimmy Burrows, who is the operational friction removal expert for leaders, the military corporate authority who transforms managers who are frustrated from constant firefighting into high performance leaders without burnout. I am beyond excited for this episode and Jimmy, so excited to have you here.
Jimmy Burroughes (00:21.302)
Adam, thanks so much for the invitation. I'm genuinely excited to see what we can come up with today.
Adam O'Leary (00:25.848)
Absolutely, so you have said before that there's a misconception of what military leadership is like Can you share a specific story from your time in the desert that completely changed your perspective on what it means to lead under pressure?
Jimmy Burroughes (00:39.79)
Yeah, absolutely. know, it's so fascinating to me because most people's perception of military leaders is it's shooting and shouting. And I sound quite flippant when I say that, but I think they think it's this very command and control, I say you do giving and barking orders and soldiers just do as they're told. And the reality is, I suppose most of us go into the military wondering what that
form of leadership really looks like and what successful leadership is. And if I think back to when I first turned up as a brand new second lieutenant in Gulf War II, so we're talking 2003, 2004, I arrive in the desert in Iraq and I'm given my staff sergeant, who's a 15-year tenured soldier, a sergeant who's probably got 12 years in the military, and a group of corporals who are kind of in the eight to 10 years range. And one of the first things my staff sergeant said to me, and I'll never forget this,
is, so your job is to make the decisions, my job is to be the expert. And so what I want you to do is to share with us any information you've got and we'll give you ideas, we'll tell you what we know, we'll share with you options. Your job is to make the decision. And it's something that stuck with me through my entire career and it's something we now teach in our programs, is there's so many leaders out there who believe they have to be the expert in everything. They have to have all the answers, have to solve all the problems, have to be able to
to put all of the issues to bed and it wears them out because they're running around trying to deal with everything. They're juggling a million balls, whacking a thousand moles and putting out all the fires everywhere. And if I think back to this story, one of the moves we had to do, one of the jobs we would do in Iraq was basically setting up drive-through shopping in the desert. So we would drive out into the desert somewhere, find somewhere to hide and create a drive-through supermarket.
and the supermarket didn't have apples and pears, it had bullets and bombs. But essentially, all the soldiers from the fighting units would congregate into this grid reference wherever it might be and they'd drive through our little collection depot and then pick up all the stuff they needed, put it on their trucks and drive back to wherever they came from. And I had no idea how to do this. I was a brand new fresh out of training officer. So I would say, look, we've got to do this. My gut tells me somewhere over here would be a good option based on what...
Jimmy Burroughes (03:04.014)
My boss has told me, what do we think? And we'd essentially get the sergeant, the staff sergeant, the corporals in the room with us. And we'd say, well, let's not use that route because that was used last week. Or, hey, there was an attack over here, so let's not go that way. Or we haven't used this route in a couple of weeks, maybe we could try this one. And we gradually, working together, put together a plan. And then about three quarters of the way through the time we allotted, because in the military you go on a one-third, two-thirds rule.
If you have an amount of time, the leadership function takes a third of it, and that leaves the soldiers two-thirds of it to prepare and get ready to go. So we've gotten a lot of the amount of time to get this planning process done, and about three-quarters of the way through that hour third, I would say, so what I'm hearing is we should do this, this, this, and this. Are we all agreed? And we get some mini refinements, not that this, okay, cool, not that this, okay, cool. Now everybody's aligned. Are we all going to...
We all agreed we're going to go from here to point A to point B to point C and then we'll come home. Yes? Great. Now go brief your soldiers. And because of that collaborative planning process, the soldiers who were involved in it, the senior soldiers who were involved in that process with me, had the opportunity to share their experience. They felt trusted, their opinions were valid, but also they'd had an opportunity to shape the plan and the strategy.
which took a lot of weight off my shoulders as the leader of the group. All I had to do was say, this is what I've heard, this is what we're going to do, and we all agreed. And I was the one making the decision. But it isn't that, okay, without informing anybody and without listening to anybody, I'm making all the decisions on my own. It was a very collaborative process. And I think people don't see that side of it on movies and TV. They just see the boss giving the orders. And it's so different in the real military.
Adam O'Leary (04:53.208)
I love that. And how did this tie back into your business career? So after the military, obviously you went into business. And I guess how did this kind of tie in together?
Jimmy Burroughes (05:01.901)
I mean, it's probably the most useful light bulb that you can turn on in a struggling manager's mind. If we think about the skill levels of leadership, one of the things that we see for more than 50 % of managers is that they get stuck at the level we call the village fisherman. And the village fisherman is the one who wakes up before everybody else, goes out no matter the weather, and tries to catch the fish for the village. And if they're successful, they come back and the village eats that day. And if they fail,
then the village goes hungry. And that's a lot of pressure to put on one person. And wouldn't it be so much better if you were playing a different role? And we like to move people from what we call the village fishermen up to what we call the icebreaker leader. And the icebreaker leader has two roles. You know, when you go to a conference or a networking event and they do the icebreaker and it's meant to kind of bring down the psychological barriers or the fear barriers of being in a room with a load of strange people.
And essentially the goal here is to increase psychological safety and trust in the room with the network that you're building or the connections that you're building and to move you from what we call your amygdaloidal response, we call it your lizard brain, into your wizard brain. So you get back to being a smart, articulate individual versus being this kind of shy, I'm going to pretend to be on my phone in the corner of the room person. That's the first type of icebreaker leader that we want. So we want the leader who puts people at ease, is
helping people to build psychological safeties, building trust with those around them, and it's taking them out of this fight or flight response. The other type of icebreaker leader that we look for is literally the boat that goes in front of the other ships to break the ice, to move the icebergs out of the way, to create the safe channel for everybody to sail through. And that's the other role of the icebreaker leader, right? They're going through saying, iceberg over there, everybody go this way. Or hold on, there's a pack ice here, I'm going to go break it with my armored hull because I've got
more experience, more robustness than you. And that will move everything out of the way so you can all sail through without losing speed and momentum. And that's probably where most of my business works. It's moving people out of this village fisherman mentality, I have to provide all the answers, be the expert, solve all the problems, into how do I become the icebreaker and create a team around me of people who are doing their best work in the best conditions possible.
Jimmy Burroughes (07:22.795)
And that's really the transition I took from the military, which was this, my job is to lead, not to do all the managing and not to do all the doing.
Adam O'Leary (07:31.064)
I love that. how do you go about, one of the most important things, I guess, with any team is building trust and basically being able to give influence, right? How can somebody be able to really build trust with their team members in a great, I guess, a quick and efficient way?
Jimmy Burroughes (07:49.771)
Yeah, trust is one of those really ethereal concepts that people struggle to get their heads around on. How do I systematize or framework eyes trust? Because when you think about trust, you know if you trust somebody or if you don't trust them, but most of us don't know how to build trust other than just be honest and reliable and a good guy or a good girl. And that doesn't really work. Equally, it's one of those things that you build in 1 % increments, but you lose in one increment.
So if you screw up, trust is gone. If you continually build trust with people, you gradually increase the amount of trust you have. So we used two frameworks here. Number one is kind of it. I don't know if you scuba dive. I love to scuba dive. And we use a scuba diving analogy here that when you're at a very superficial level of trust, it's kind of like snorkeling. You're floating around on the surface of that relationship.
And you can see some stuff, you can see some fishies and turtles and some interesting cool things, there's things you know that are going on that you can't see because they're down deeper. But if things go wrong, you can just hop back in the boat. There's no danger. And then you start to get your paddy license and you become an open water diver. You can go to 18 meters and then you can go down to 30 meters and then like some friends of mine, you can go down to kind of 100 meters. They're very, very experienced tech divers.
That's amazing because each time you go down a layer of trust, you get access to new things that you couldn't see before. So maybe you can go to those shipwrecks or those deep coral reefs or go and see, and I'm going, end of this week to go and see shoals of hammerhead sharks and bull sharks at 40 meters. You know, it's going to be amazing, but you can't get there easily. It requires training and skill and time. And if it goes wrong,
then it's a little bit harder to get out of and the consequences are greater when it goes wrong. But knowing that about trust, we can't suddenly go into, let's do trust exercises in our team and I'll tell you some super vulnerable things. I won't go into the detail of the model, but the very simple version of this is called a vulnerability loop and it was invented by a guy called Jay Polzer. And essentially, person A shares something a little bit vulnerable, like,
Jimmy Burroughes (10:07.382)
How are you today? know, I'm feeling nine out of 10 or eight out of 10. I'm not feeling 100%. I'm sorry to hear that says person B. Do know what? I'm not feeling great too. So they respond and mirror vulnerability. And person A says, this person's being a little bit vulnerable with me. I'll go a little bit deeper. And person B says, I'll go a little bit deeper too. And we work our way down in this vulnerability kind of helical model spiral of trust, which gradually gains us into a more trusting environment.
Now, we have seven levers that allow us to do that, which I won't go into today because it's too long-winded, but essentially it's how do I create psychological safety for you? How do I get real clarity around the things that I want from you and you need from me? How do I turn up and show it for you and do what I said I was going to do? And so on and so on. So there are specific methodologies that we use that are almost like a checklist. And each time we move down our
scuba diving model from the snorkeling at the surface down into our deeper, deeper diving, we repeat those seven steps and that helps us move to the next layer down. And by having a system to do it, you know if something's starting to go wrong or you're wavering a little bit, that you can do a regain because you focus back on those seven steps. The other thing I think is probably pertinent just to bring up is the idea of relationships and trust being like a bank account.
I'm sure you've got a bank account, Adam, yes?
Adam O'Leary (11:36.93)
hope so.
Jimmy Burroughes (11:37.868)
Yeah, I hope so too. Well, most of us have a bank account that we try to keep in a positive number, So if you were to have a bank account that you continually made a withdrawal from and just took more more and more money out that maybe you didn't have, you weren't putting your salary in there, you were just taking money out, what's going to happen at some point?
Adam O'Leary (11:57.581)
things are going to happen.
Jimmy Burroughes (11:58.859)
Yeah, the bank manager is going to call you up and say like, hey, do we have a relationship here? And maybe we don't want to work with you anymore. And this is what happens in most people's relationships. know, they send a message to somebody like, hey, can you just do this for me? Do this work for me? Send this thing to me? And what they're doing is essentially a bank account withdrawal on the relationship. And they're overdrawn and they keep getting overdrawn. And then all of a sudden they need something big. And the bank account manager says, yeah, no, it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.
So the bank account closes and that's the end of the relationship or the friendship and that is a breach of trust. So if you can constantly look at every relationship you've had and go, how can I pay into this bank account? What does this person value or need that's going to get my balance into the positive? That really helps accelerate trust building.
Adam O'Leary (12:46.486)
I love that and you have any I guess tricks where or I guess a simple win where you could basically provide value or kind of boost that relationship value there especially when it comes to preventing fires right managers were always dealing with fires all the time so I'm sure having goodwill in your bank account helps you prevent those fires do you to share about that?
Jimmy Burroughes (13:11.424)
Yeah, we use, it's the same model actually that we use for career conversations, but it's a really great one just to get to know somebody. And it's the four A's, ability, agility, aspirations and assessments. And the way we use this model in this environment is we make a judgment call based on performance we see of somebody on their ability. So is this person doing really, really well in their job, okay in their job, struggling in their job?
That's going to give us the ability to say, I can give this person something that's going to get them promoted, something that's going to get them broadened out, or something that's going to help them do their job better. Agility, where do they want to go? What are their aspirations? So have they got potential to go further? Or are they one of those people that we need these people who's really happy doing their nine to five in their current space? If they are, then I'm going to show them opportunities that might be of personal interest. Whereas if somebody who's like a gun who wants to get promoted,
then I'm going to show them opportunities and try and give them value of like, hey, did you see this opportunity? Did you see this job? Have you heard about this project that's coming up? Aspiration, same thing. What do they aspire to in life? You know, are they an avid traveler? Are they a scuba diver? Are they a wine lover? Try and connect with something personal and hear about their aspirations. Maybe they're a super passionate parent. I met one guy recently and he was just, he was a steady Eddie in his job. Absolutely had been in the same job for 25 years. His passion,
was coaching his kids' sports teams. And he was like super coach and was renowned in the region and sought out by other teams to consult as a coach for their teams. So I found things on sports coaching that I could send him that built relationship value. And assessments, well, you might know if they've got any assessment and it's more for the career conversations, but for this one, you might have some data. For example, we do psychometric testing with our clients. We do...
skills assessments, strengths finder assessments, so we can say, well, based on what I know about you, this could be a great direction to go. And as somebody who's in the development world, I can help them. So the quick win here is maybe just have a personal conversation, human to human, and go, hey, what are you into? What's your hopes and dreams? What would you love to do if you weren't working? Those little questions give you little nuggets of gold that create the personal connection that means that you can add value to the bank account, which isn't just a, could you do this thing by email for me?
Adam O'Leary (15:34.22)
You're saying that's not the right way? No, just joking. But this has been awesome. Yes. So can you tell everybody where to go to learn more about you?
Jimmy Burroughes (15:42.601)
Yeah, so website is jblhighperformance.com. Jimmy Burrows on LinkedIn. That's probably the two best places to find me to be honest. Our website has all the details about our offerings and a couple of my books and blog and podcast and stuff like that. LinkedIn, I'm fairly active in terms of posting conversations and I'm always happy to meet and talk to new people.
Adam O'Leary (16:06.208)
Awesome, and everybody, so thank you so much for being on Jimmy, and seriously guys, if you are looking to stop burnout, really to be able to put out fires in a streamlined and efficient way, talk to Jimmy. Go check him out, give him a message. He is definitely the guy to talk to. Jimmy, thank you so much for being here with me.
Jimmy Burroughes (16:24.299)
Thank very much for opportunity. I really appreciate it.
Adam O'Leary (16:26.571)
Awesome. Have a great rest of your day, everyone, and I will see you on the next episode.
