July 1, 2025 • 48 mins
Welcome back to The First Responder Playbook! In this episode, host Brent sits down with John Guaspari, a seasoned leadership expert, consultant, and author of eight books—including the newly released "If Engagement is the What, Then Respect is the How." John’s journey is anything but typical: from aerospace engineer, to a Swiss army knife writer at Honeywell, to an in-demand consultant helping Fortune 500 companies transform the way they lead and engage their people.
This conversation unpacks why respect is the foundation for building trust, empowerment, and ultimately, genuine engagement within organizations—even those with paramilitary structures like first responder agencies. John shares candid stories from his own career, highlights generational and communication gaps in leadership, and offers practical wisdom for supervisors at every level. Whether you’re on the front lines or in the admin office, you’ll take away actionable insights on how listening, empathy, and daily respect can make your team stronger and more motivated.
Stick around as John opens up about his most meaningful professional moments, what effective engagement really looks like, and why sometimes, it’s the simple but difficult things that truly make the difference in leadership.
Want to be a guest on The First Responder Playbook: Insights on Leadership and Training? Send Brent Colbert a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1748037097521814b71b1b454
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Guys, welcome to the First Responder Playbook. I have John
Gaspari with me tonight. John's wroten,
man, it's Monday somewhere. Written seven books, done a
lot of leadership training with a lot of big companies. Like normal,
I'm gonna let him introduce himself because I want him to do himself justice.
So, John, the stage is yours. Oh, thanks, Brad. I
(00:23):
appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, I. I've been around for a while. I'm.
I started out my career as an aerospace engineer a
long time ago, but quickly realized that was not
the career for me and the American flying public
(00:43):
should thank me that I decided to move on
and I moved into other work in. I
tried for a few years to work as a freelance writer,
got a few things published, was unable to make a living at it, so
I got a job at Honeywell in the Boston area.
(01:04):
I now live in the Boston area. It's where I've lived. I grew up in
New York, but I lived in the Boston area ever since I got out of
school. And
I worked for Honeywell, where I was kind of the way I think
of it as like a Swiss army knife of a writer.
Anything that needed writing, I would write. Product
(01:24):
descriptions, marketing brochures, executive
speeches. If it needed writing, I would write it. And
the best thing about that job is it's where I met my. The woman who
had become my wife. And. And I
moved down from that job to another company. And it was while I was at
that other company in a similar kind of position that
(01:48):
I noticed something about
just the way a lot of leaders went about their work,
that they weren't terribly effective at
communicating with the people who work for them, that if they
wanted to truly motivate people, the way they went about
it was not good, was
(02:10):
ineffective. So I wrote a very, very short book
in my spare time. I told my boss, I'm going to do this on my
own in my spare time. So, you know, don't worry, it's not going to
get in the way of my other work. And I wrote it and
I was amazed that I found an agent and amazed that I found a
publisher and really amazed that it sold like
(02:33):
gangbusters. And that came in very
handy because soon after it got published, I got laid off.
Not because of the book, it was just because of the realities of the
business. But that did come in very handy because
we had just bought a new house and so that
big new house with a big new mortgage and I had a newly big
(02:55):
wife, she was seven months pregnant with our second child.
And my book was out there and I began to get phone
calls from people saying, do you do speeches on this
kind of thing? Do you do seminars? And up to then I've been saying no,
I have a job. But that day, the
day after I got laid off, I got a phone call from
(03:18):
someone said do you do speeches about this sort of thing? I said,
why yes I do. And they said, by any chance
are you available on this was in August. So on, I
don't know, October 16th. And this is in pre
Internet days. So I got some
blank pieces of paper and riffled them in front of the phone and said, let
(03:40):
me look at my calendar to see if I'm free. Well, I had the
whole next 10 years free as far as I knew. Well,
yes, that day's open. And that sent me
down a road which I continue to go down for the
next 30 years of consulting
on various technical topics. But the common theme throughout all
(04:03):
of them was how do you communicate more effectively
to get people more highly. And the word that gets used in
the business world more highly engaged in their work
and engagement means in that context
is getting people to give the
incremental bit of effort and energy on the job
(04:26):
because if you don't do it right, they're not inclined to do it. Now I
imagine first responders are pretty,
pretty motivated people or they wouldn't be doing that kind of work.
Yeah, absolutely. But, but I would think though
that if you, if you don't do the communication part
right, you can do some things that
(04:48):
might demotivate cause a little bit of demotivation.
You're not going to turn them off completely because they are motivated people,
but you might cause them to be at the margin a
little bit demotivated and then that would be terrible thing to do in the business
world. It, it often goes the other way. People, a lot of people are
just kind of going through the motions and you need to build them up.
(05:12):
I actually have a story that actually I feel fits
perfectly with that. Okay. I had a
supervisor, that man, I swear me and my best
friend would do the exact same thing and he would get
a commendation. I'd get rode up. For whatever
reason, me and that supervisor just did not mesh up very well.
(05:34):
And I, when I would be was on his
shift, it just demotivated me because
he didn't know how to communicate with me. He was an older
marine from the 80s. And
I wouldn't say that I'm of the younger
generation anymore, but you know, a different generation than him.
(05:56):
Yeah. And there was A clear. And
I recognized that there was a clear communication gap.
And I tried so hard to fix that.
And after a while I finally just gave up because he wasn't,
he wouldn't, will it work with me. And I just gave up
on trying to communicate with him because I knew what the issue was.
(06:20):
There was, there was, there was a generational gap. He was ex
military, I'm not. And
I just could not bridge that gap. And so finally that's
exactly right. I got demotivated and I gave up. Now I didn't stop working
because deep down inside, you know, I have a calling to go
out there and serve the public. But I guarantee I wasn't
(06:42):
as proactive, you know, going out and
trying to find stuff when I was on shift with him. Right. I
had, I had the last 10 years of my career. I was a
consultant for about 30 years, but the last 10 years
I went to, I told, I'd always told my wife, after
(07:03):
years and years of travel as a consultant, I always told my wife,
before I retire, I want to go work, go back to work
for a company to see if,
if the stuff I've been preaching really ticks. Because as a
consultant, you fly in, you might work with a company for a few weeks, for
a few months, maybe even a year, but then you get to leave.
(07:27):
I wanted to see if I could go in and go deep within a company
as just an employee, because as a consultant you also have a little
bit of cachet. The saying in
the consulting business is the expert is the guy who has the
airplane ticket in his pocket. You could come in as
the guy who flies in the hot shot
(07:49):
or whatever. Some people roll their eyes when they say it
with good reason.
And so I got a job with a major
defense contractor. Now these defense
contractors, the management of these defense
contractors tend to be populated by former military.
(08:12):
So at one point while working there, I had
responsibility for leadership development program of a very
large chunk of the business. And so one of the
people that I was counseling
was a retired admiral and good
guy, well intentioned guy, smart guy,
(08:34):
said to me, john, you know, I know what
I want done. I think I'm clear about what I want done.
I tell people what I want done. It doesn't get done in the way I
want it done or as fast as I want it done. And I remember saying
to him, well, Bill, you got to realize that people don't
do what you want them to do in the way you want them to do
(08:56):
it. You can't have them thrown in federal prison anymore.
You've got to use some influence techniques. You can't
just say do it or you're going into the brig,
you know, and you also, you don't want
to play occasionally, not into the brig, but occasionally,
(09:17):
yes. If you're a boss, occasionally you
might want to just simply use your authority to get something
done. But if that's your go to move, you're not going to be very
effective as a leader. Right. You need, you
need to know how to influence people.
So it was because of that and examples like that that
(09:39):
over the years I
learned a fair amount about what worked and what didn't work.
And that's what, you know, you
mentioned that I had written seven books. Matter of fact, I just
published my eighth book. That's awesome. And
(10:01):
it's a very short book. And its title is if
engagement is the what, then respect is the how and
what. It's saying. If what you want is to have your employees more highly engaged,
then about 85% of the battle is treating them with respect
to. And I don't simply say that, but I
talk about what that really means and how you go about doing it and
(10:24):
why if you don't do that, you're going to run into those kind of
roadblocks and pitfalls.
That's. That's so true. And that's
actually something that
for the longest time I felt like in the first responder world that they do,
I didn't recognize is it was
(10:46):
always, well, that's the way we've always done it and that's the way we're going
to continue to do it. I feel like maybe in the last five to 10
years, it's finally started to come out a little bit
of like, hey, if you have five people on your shift as a
supervisor, you've got five different personalities that you have
to manage that probably have five different interests in law
(11:08):
enforcement. And you kind of have to. It's kind of
like baking a cake. You got to put all the ingredients together to make a
good shift and. Yeah, go ahead.
I was just gonna say it's slowly getting better, but
I mean, it's, it's definitely taking a long time.
It's five different interests in law enforcement and
(11:30):
five different life stories. Like again, the
fellow you had on your last episode had
triplets crying in the background. Yes.
I'm 75 years old. You aren't going to hear any triplets crying in the background
in my life. You know what you see over there
is a cat. That's a
(11:53):
sentence I never thought I would utter. I have a cat.
My wife passed away five years ago and I inherited her.
Actually, I have three cats. That's an even less likely sentence. I
thought I would ever. But I don't have triplets. So, I mean,
I have a very different life. You know, I
(12:15):
head up a. I play a lot of golf.
I'm on the board of governors at my golf course. I head up a
committee and I'm trying to pull together a meeting for
my committee. And I'm thinking, well, I'll just pull Everybody together at
10 o' clock in the morning. And then I, oh, wait a minute,
people still work. I can't,
(12:37):
I can't just assume everybody can show up at
one in the afternoon like I can. Why can't they?
You know, and I mean, that's a silly example, but it
is and it isn't. It's just taking a minute to
realize, oh yeah, they have their own lives, they have their own
issues. And everybody, and
(13:01):
everybody has a story to tell. Everybody has some
stuff that's going on in their life that's tough.
That's, you know, that may or may not be any of
your business, but you need to
acknowledge that people are living real
(13:22):
lives and you got to give people a
little bit of slack in the rope so that they can live there, all
that stuff. And, and that's, you
know, I'm almost embarrassed that, that I,
that this stuff, I mean, I'm pointing over here, this is, I
have my, this is my book here, the new one,
(13:47):
and that it's very basic, but, but it's,
I don't hear anybody else saying it quite as directly that just,
I mean, the, the, the definition of respect that I
offer in the book is giving due
consideration to the other. To,
(14:08):
to others. That's all. Other and others.
Others is a loaded word these days. Politically.
You get into a lot of trouble if you say others. Oh, you're gonna,
you're trying to other that person. I'm sure
you're aware of all that. Oh, yeah, I think
(14:28):
I'm okay, because my definition of other in this context
is everybody who isn't you.
I'm not talking about a category, I'm not talking about a
demographic set. I'm talking with just
anybody else giving due consideration
to others. When you, what you say or don't say,
(14:50):
what you do or don't do, did you stop and think about
how it affected others? That's all.
And it's a simple notion. It's very hard to do.
And, and you'll have a much higher chance of doing
it if you. I joke around
with people. I say if you stop, if you take a beat,
(15:14):
maybe take a shot of scotch and think about it,
and that, you know, you're more likely to.
Okay, stop and think. That's all. Just think about. Did
you stop and think? I have.
In my book, I give an example of, of someone who, of
(15:36):
an employee who gets an email from a boss.
And the employee had sent something to the boss via email
that he thought was in response to what the boss
had requested. And the boss had said simply,
not what I was looking for with four exclamation points.
(15:57):
And not. This poor guy now gets this, well,
what's he supposed to do with this? Does he go see the
boss? Well, if he knows the boss well, maybe he can,
he can go and say, hey, you having a bad day? What is this?
But if you don't know him well, maybe he can, you know.
(16:17):
But if the boss had taken a minute and said,
he could have said, not what I was looking for. But then they added a
little bit. I thought we were going to talk
about X, Y and Z. Ah, now the
person. No, okay, now you've given me something to go on. But
because he just blew off steam,
(16:39):
he sent that guy into a swivet. Maybe that
guy had a. Cancel his staff meeting with his people.
And that has a ripple effect throughout the organization. They had to
rearrange their schedules because he
hadn't given due consideration because he had been
disrespectful. And if, if you're not being
(17:02):
respectful of people, why would you think down the
road they're going to give incremental effort and energy? Why do you, why would you
think they're going to be more highly engaged? Exactly.
It's. I was talking to somebody about
this the other day. They said, oh, it's very easy. I said, it's not
(17:22):
easy. It's simple. There's a difference.
Something can be simultaneously simple and difficult.
The notion of giving consideration is a simple notion, but it's
difficult to do in the, in the midst of a day
when you're very busy and you've got your own stresses and
strains. Maybe you're getting flack from your boss,
(17:46):
you know, but you got a better chance of doing it if you keep
that in mind. That's, that's all I, that,
that's all I propose. I agree wholeheartedly.
And that's, you know, and you say it's, you say it's not
a hard topic and it's it is with how simple it is.
But I love it. It's difficult. It's a simple notion, but
(18:09):
it's difficult to do very. Yeah, that's what I was going to get at is
it's, it's something that people just don't grasp
for whatever reason. You know.
I think some people, they, they,
they, I think some people, well, here, these are the worst cases think if
(18:30):
they're higher, then they look at an organizational
chart and they think, well, if, if I'm here and you're
here, I don't need to worry about that. I need
to worry about this up, not down.
And that's cancer.
Organization. What
(18:53):
I was, I was reading some of the, you know, questions that,
you know, intrigue you and
first responders, I mean, I'm not gonna say they're unique, but we have a very
paramilitaristic structure. You know, we have our front line
supervisors and then they have, you know, probably like the next
(19:13):
level above them or the ones that, you know, maybe run the shifts or run
the districts and then you have your administration level supervisors.
What, what's the one leadership skill that
matters the most at each level?
At each level or at all levels? All levels.
(19:35):
All right. I would think
listening and first cousin listening is
empathy and knowing and
knowing. You know, and again, I, I've said
to people, you know, giving due consideration to
the other does not mean you're throwing, you're there to throw rose petals
(19:58):
in people's paths. You got a business to run, you've got a,
you've got a, you've got a first responder organization. And that,
and that is, there are times when it's
literally life and death and they're in time to
go through all kinds of niceties. So I'm not suggesting that
that's why the word do D U e is in there
(20:22):
giving appropriate consideration to the other, due consideration
to the other. But I just think
I, you know, that
one of the, one of the, one of the things you'll hear people talk about
and one of the things I say in the book I offer, I
offer first cousin to respect is
(20:46):
trust. And the definition of
trust that I offer is is
confident expectation that if
everybody knows what to expect, that
means time has been taken to set those expectations
(21:06):
and is confident in that, is confident in what will happen.
If expectations aren't met,
then you can have trust. So for example,
if you, if, if someone in
good faith
(21:28):
does something, doesn't meet expectations,
what's going to happen is the boss is their Boss going to say,
all right, that didn't quite work
out. Let's talk about why that didn't work out. What did you overlook?
What might we have done differently? Let's think about that. That's
(21:49):
one approach. The other approach would be the boss is going to rip
his face off. Now, again,
in some circumstances, the more
the rip your face off response might be the necessary one. If
there's no time to have this soulful
(22:10):
searching and comparing of notes.
But, but confident
expectations is, is the definition of, of
trust that, that I, I suggest. And, and
one of the things I say to people is you, you, you
should not trust people presumptively. I don't,
(22:32):
I don't know. I met you, Brent, 25
minutes ago, right, Virtually. If you and I
were working on a project and I was
a project leader and you said to me, oh, I'll have that
for you by next Friday at, you know, two o' clock.
I'm not going to say, okay, good, I'm not going to check.
(22:55):
I am going to check. Doesn't mean I think you're a bad guy.
Doesn't mean I have any reason to think you won't do it. But I don't
know exactly. We don't have any
experience together. On the other hand, if you and I work together
for five years and you've come through every
(23:15):
single time without fail, and you say, I'll have it
for you by next Friday at 2 o' clock, I'll say,
go with God, do it. We're good,
you know, and so that's why I say trust should not be given
presumptively, but it can be earned. And
so over time, that person who at first I might have said,
(23:39):
I'm going to check over time, okay,
now that person has earned that level of trust that I had. Respect,
on the other hand, is different. Respect
must always be given presumptively. I can think
of nothing more.
More. Arrogant or pompous than saying, you
(24:02):
must earn my respect, you know,
well, who the blank are you to say I have
to earn your, you know, Exactly.
You see, I'm saying I it respect's different. And the other thing that
makes respect different from all these other things is respect
(24:23):
is something that I, John, and you, Brent, have complete
control over. I have complete control over
whether or not I show respect to everybody else I
work with, whether it's the president of the company
or the, or the guy who comes and empties my waste basket or
(24:43):
everybody else in between. I have complete
control over that. And if people who work for me see
me showing respect to everybody up and down
and across the organization, they're more likely
to manifest the same kind of
respect. So it's coming back to the question you asked me a while
(25:06):
ago. I think that
the thing that leaders can do, it's
listen in empathy and manifesting respect
is the thing that's probably most essential
because that, that
(25:27):
propagates through an organization and the lack of it does
too. People pick up on, on.
This is a place where I like this people, I respect that.
They also sense I don't like the way people are treated
here. And
(25:49):
so there's another word that you saw time, Empowerment. You hear
that word? Yes.
I, I in, in a
auditorium and listened to. It was
a large company. They were getting the results
(26:09):
of a survey they had done of their employees,
thousands and thousands of employees. It was a big company
and they asked their employees the extent to which they felt empowered
and the results were very disappointing.
So the president of the company got up after the
(26:30):
results had been reported and there was some discussion about it.
The president company got up and he said, you could tell he was,
he was just, we shook his head and he said, and the people
in the room were his direct reports and their
direct reports. So these were high level people in the
company. He said, I need you people to
(26:52):
understand something. You are all empowered.
I now need you to go back and tell your people, make sure your
people understand that they are empowered, are all empowered.
And I was sitting in the back of the room and I could, from where
I was sitting, I could see a guy in the front row is one of
his vice presidents. He started to put his hand up
(27:16):
and then he pulled it down and then
there was a break. And so during the break I got ahold of that guy
and I said, you wanted to say something. When he said
he told people that he wanted, he wanted you to go and tell people they
were empowered. And he said, yeah, I did. I said, what was it you
wanted to say? He said, what I wanted to say was
(27:38):
we could tell people they're empowered until we're blue in the face. But if they
don't feel empowered, they're not empowered. I said, well, why
didn't you say it? He said, oh no,
too risky. Think of the irony
of that. He didn't feel empowered
to tell his boss that the way he was approaching
(28:00):
empowerment was wrong.
He was not empowered to say that's not the
way to do empowerment. The
definition of empowerment that I suggest in the book is
a feeling of safety while exercising judgment
on the job, a feeling of
(28:24):
safety while exercising judgment. So if you're on the job and you're just going down
a checklist, you don't need to exercise judgment.
But if you're going down the checklist and partway through, you think,
maybe I ought to deviate from this checklist a little bit. Now
you're exercising judgment.
Now you're going to ask yourself, well, what will happen if
(28:47):
I do that and things go south? Now we're back
to the trust thing. Will my boss rip my face off?
Or will he sit me down and say, all right, you did your best, but
all these things fit together.
The way I put it together in the book is respect
(29:08):
will lead to trust. Trust will lead to
empowerment. Empowerment will lead to engagement. But it
all starts with respect and respect. Of all those four things,
respect is the one thing that everybody has complete control
over. Those other things require other
people doing things. You have complete control
(29:31):
over whether or not you give respect to the other.
And that's, that's
the little soapbox that I'm on these days. I love that.
And that's so true. That's actually very spot on.
I love that. I, I have something that
really piqued my interest on here. It says,
(29:54):
how should leaders measure engagement if not through
surveys? Because in the
first responder world, I feel like every once in a while,
these chiefs, especially at bigger agencies, put out these,
you know, surveys to their unions or whoever and say, hey, fill these
out, tell us what's going right, tell us what's going wrong.
(30:17):
And you might get maybe 10% of them to participate.
And the ones that are usually participating are the ones that are like, man, this
is the best place ever. What's your
take on that? Like, what's your take on if not surveys? Like,
what's the best way to get engagement or measure engagement?
Surveys are fine for what they are if you
(30:40):
recognize that. If you're only getting 10% response,
that should tell you that is telling you something important right there.
Yeah. Beyond surveys, if it's possible for you to
do focus groups,
those are harder to do. Surveys are easy to do as we speak.
(31:02):
Today is Monday the 23rd. I mentioned I belong in
my golf club. I,
I'm responsible for our annual member survey. We launched
our annual member survey today. So I
just checked before I got on this call with you. We have 81 responses so
(31:23):
far. It's fine. It's fine. And it will give
us very valuable information. We've been doing this survey for
10 years. We compare it year to year. It's very valuable. We know
what it is, but we also know what it is. I also got an email
from a friend of mine who sends me the same email
every year when the survey goes out. John, why do we keep doing the survey
(31:45):
when we know nothing will come of it? And I always send the
same response back, Paul, you're wrong. We
do listen to the results. Changes do happen as a
result of it. Then he writes back, well, what are the changes? And
I write back, I'm not going to get into that with you, Paul. Have a
nice evening. And then he,
(32:07):
you know, because. But surveys
are fine for what they are. I would,
I would recommend,
if you, if you can manage, a way to do focus groups
that gives you richer, meatier kinds of
(32:27):
information.
I mean, engagement, you know, you should
see things like
employee retention rates. Now, you probably have pretty high retention rates,
but I don't know how big of that issue
that is with you. But absenteeism should go down.
(32:52):
People are more engaged, they want to come to work.
Those are the signs of higher levels of engagement. There
aren't the things you will see in corporate America like profitability up and
productivity up. Well, there are probably some productivity
measures that you could come up with. I don't know what they would be offhand,
but the profitability, No, I
(33:14):
would. Say on productivity wise, a lot of guys just making
contact with people that are, you know, out there committing
crimes and traffic violations, engaging with the
public, guys that are more productive will get out and do that on a
more regular basis. And then guys that are kind of checked out, they're
usually just taking their calls and going home, maybe
(33:37):
checking business properties. So they're not as proactive. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well.
That would be how I would measure it in the first responder world, because
at least on the cop side. But
yeah, I like
(33:58):
focus groups. Would you,
let me ask you this. On the focus group side, would you break it up
with just general officers and then frontline supervisors, or would
you mix them all together? If you're coming from the administration down,
how would you do that?
(34:19):
I, I guess it would depend on what your,
what your objectives are for the focus group. My, my
initial, my gut reaction
would be to keep it at the same level, not mix it, because
that might, might
stifle the discussion. If you have cross,
(34:41):
you know, above different levels. Yep. If you
want to get one level
talking in the different levels and then, and then maybe have the
results of those and circulate those levels and Then bring
together vertical cuts
again. I don't know, I, I, I don't know enough about
(35:03):
it. But, you know, there are various ways to do it.
Those are, you know, those two are, are tricky to do because you do
that and then you also, you wind up getting the notes from
Paul's of the World saying, all right, we did that. Now what?
And, you know, once you ask the question, you're sort of,
(35:27):
you feel obliged to do something with what you found out.
And so I, I
don't want to, I don't want to be too glib about a response to that.
That's fair.
So if I don't want to tie you up all night, but I've had a
blast talking to you. I, I just, I love
(35:49):
that. I'm actually working on my doctorate in leadership right now.
Oh, great. And I just, I love just listening
to you talk about these different ideas because, like, the academic
side of me is like, I could sit here and listen to him talk all
night. You don't want,
you bet. You ought to be careful what you wish for, right?
(36:11):
So if somebody wants to, you know, get in contact with you,
can you give them a little details about your website, where to find your books?
My website is my name. My name's on the screen. My website
is John Gasparry, but all one word, no space between the N and The
G. John GasParry.com. that's my
website. And my books are on the website. And
(36:34):
along with. I, over the years, have written
hundreds and hundreds of articles. They're not
all there, but I went through, I've called through and
have a number of articles on the website.
I also, to keep
(36:54):
myself sane, back in the late 90s and early
2000s, I was on the road a lot.
And to stay sane,
I wrote a weekly humor column for my local
newspaper. That's awesome. Do you know Dave
(37:14):
Berry? I don't. Okay. He's a,
the best humor columnist in America for many, many years.
He wrote for the Miami Herald, syndicated in
500 papers. He was my hero. Anyway, anyway,
anyway, I'm sure I've read. Him at some point because I, I
was on the tail end of the newspaper era. Okay.
(37:38):
He still shows up. You know, you still catch him on,
on websites. He.
So I wrote a weekly humor column in.
I have a pretty good sampling of the humor columns
that I wrote on my website as well, which I think are fun to read.
(38:00):
At least I think they're fun. Here's a real
quick thing. Real quick thing. I don't want to Bore you too much with this.
But Dave Berry, very, very funny writer. He,
I read him for years and he occasionally would write
about. He had a bloodhound named Ernest.
(38:20):
Ernest would show up in his columns from time to time.
Well, we wound up with a basset hound
named Ernie. So I wrote a column
once that mentioned Ernie the basset hound.
And I remember thinking, huh. And this
(38:40):
was pre, pre email days.
I printed out a copy of the
column with Ernie in which I mentioned
Ernie. I actually wrote a fan letter today, but. Wrote
a letter, remember those? Yes. I had to put an
envelope and put a stamp on it. In the
(39:04):
letter I said, dave, just want to say thanks
for many years of many laughs. I know you write about your
bloodhound named Ernest. I wrote the
attached column on which I mentioned my bass and how named Ernie. Thought you might
enjoy it. Sincerely, John Gasparry. Blah blah
blah. Two weeks later I get
(39:26):
a postcard from Miami Herald and all it
said on it was John Woof, Dave
Barry. It's,
it's on the wall four feet over from where I am sitting. Right. It's
one of my prized possession. I love that. That's awesome. Was.
(39:48):
That'S awesome. I want to give you
one thing to close the episode on,
please. Over your long
illustrious career, what's your absolute favorite moment
of like doing everything?
(40:11):
If you had to pick the cherry on top. What's the cherry on top?
In the, in around the year 2000 and
the year 2000, my business partner and
I had done about a
two year consulting project with an insurance company that was based
(40:33):
in Keene, New Hampshire. Keene is a
little town in the lower left hand corner of New Hampshire.
And
when we bid the project, it was just he and
I and you know,
and the name of our company was Gaspari and Salts.
(40:57):
His name was North Salz. And like in the
consulting world you have
stringers who you call on for any given project you
reach out and grab. We need three people, we need five. Everybody knows a bunch
of people who will help out.
So it was a pretty good sized project for us. And we
(41:18):
were going up against two of the big
consulting companies based in Boston. And we were two
little jabronis in and
you know, in suburban Boston.
And it came down to the final dog and
pony show was down to three of us. And I
(41:41):
remember the president of the consulting of the insurance
company said all right, well what can you do for us
that we. How would you work out a billing for us that's on a,
on a contingency basis that is our billing would
be contingent on measurable
(42:02):
results we got for them.
And it was a moment where
I could feel my heart beating because I know I was going
to say no. I knew I was going to say no, but I
couldn't say no, we don't do that. I had a sound,
(42:24):
right? I said, tom, I'm sorry, we don't work on
contingencies. Well, how do we know you have skin in the game?
And I remember looking him in the eye and saying, tom, it's
just Norton. I. All we have is
our reputation. If we do this work for you and
we screw it up, we are screwed.
(42:47):
You will have our effort, you will have
everything we have, but you will not, we
will not do this on a contingency basis.
And we left. And I remember he and I drove home to my partner and
I drove home together and I said, what do you think? And he said, I'm
glad you said that, but I don't know, we may, that might have blown us
(43:07):
out of the water. We got a call the next day that we got the
job. Fast forward two years later.
We had done two years of work with them. It was a huge
success. And
they had like a banquet at the end to like a
celebration of the success of what we had done with
(43:29):
them. It had involved re engineering a bunch of their, of
their work processes and all that. But first
we had gone out with them and interviewed a bunch of
their customers and taught their people how to interview customers
so that it wasn't us coming back. That was another interesting thing,
wasn't us interviewing customers and telling them what customers said.
(43:52):
We said, no, you need to go talk to customers. And these are
people from backroom functions that didn't talk to customers
because we wanted to get the voice of the customer
inculcated throughout the organization. And everybody began to
hear it. And
(44:13):
one of the things that happened was so I, I, I
wrote an article for, for I, I had a
regular monthly space in a business magazine.
I wrote an article about the work we had done and it was
blowing smoke at ourselves about what a wonderful job we had done.
(44:33):
A year later I wrote another article said a year ago I wrote an article
about this job. Well, here's the postscript.
The main thing we had convinced them to do was they had done, they had
had their claim centers regionally. We had
convinced them no, it made more sense to have one national
(44:54):
claim center in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And we convinced them. Then they did that.
About a year later, that claim center burned down.
And we had told him Put everything, put all your eggs in that basket.
But what happened was that
(45:17):
the, the day it happened, the president of the company's got his head in his
hands and he looks up and he's got people from hr, people
from accounting, people from facilities,
people from non customer facing functions in his
doorway saying, how can we help? Because they
had been the people out talking to customers and they recognized how important it
(45:39):
was. And
he said that within 36 hours they
had adjuster centers, claim center,
temporary claim center up and running and had lost virtually
no time. And he said that happened because
of the way we had gone about it with them. That was probably
(46:01):
the most gratifying thing
that, you
know, I knew what we had been doing was good work.
But the picture, through the way he told it, him
looking up and seeing all these people in his doorways saying, how can
(46:21):
we help that moment? You know,
and, and I told you they had the big celebration, the big
banquet. And yes, this is me patting
myself on the back at the end. They went around and said, we did this,
we did that. We accomplished this. Not we, but they
had accomplished this. They had accomplished that. And they said, there's a couple of people
(46:45):
we'd like to thank. And they said, one is North Stalls. That was my business
partner. And then they said, the other is John Gaspari. And
the place rose and gave me a standing ovation because I
had gone around the company and
done a seminar
for every employee in the company to explain why we
(47:07):
were doing what we were doing. And
that consulting engagement was the most gratifying thing I ever
did in my consulting career. That's awesome.
That makes it all work. That was the second most important part of my business
career. The most important thing was I met my wife at Honeywell.
(47:29):
Can't forget that. No, no, you
can't. Married. Married to her for 40 years. That's
awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. Well,
John, you've been a great guest and I would, at
some point, I would love to have you back on. Sure. Because
you were, like I said, you, you were great.
(47:53):
So I will wrap this up, guys. John
Gaspari dot com. He's got his books.
Reach out to him again. He's a wealth of knowledge.
John, thank you. You were awesome. Thank you. Have a good night.
You too.
Guys, welcome to the First Responder Playbook. I have John
Gaspari with me tonight. John's wroten,
man, it's Monday somewhere. Written seven books, done a
lot of leadership training with a lot of big companies. Like normal,
I'm gonna let him introduce himself because I want him to do himself justice.
So, John, the stage is yours. Oh, thanks, Brad. I
(00:23):
appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, I. I've been around for a while. I'm.
I started out my career as an aerospace engineer a
long time ago, but quickly realized that was not
the career for me and the American flying public
(00:43):
should thank me that I decided to move on
and I moved into other work in. I
tried for a few years to work as a freelance writer,
got a few things published, was unable to make a living at it, so
I got a job at Honeywell in the Boston area.
(01:04):
I now live in the Boston area. It's where I've lived. I grew up in
New York, but I lived in the Boston area ever since I got out of
school. And
I worked for Honeywell, where I was kind of the way I think
of it as like a Swiss army knife of a writer.
Anything that needed writing, I would write. Product
(01:24):
descriptions, marketing brochures, executive
speeches. If it needed writing, I would write it. And
the best thing about that job is it's where I met my. The woman who
had become my wife. And. And I
moved down from that job to another company. And it was while I was at
that other company in a similar kind of position that
(01:48):
I noticed something about
just the way a lot of leaders went about their work,
that they weren't terribly effective at
communicating with the people who work for them, that if they
wanted to truly motivate people, the way they went about
it was not good, was
(02:10):
ineffective. So I wrote a very, very short book
in my spare time. I told my boss, I'm going to do this on my
own in my spare time. So, you know, don't worry, it's not going to
get in the way of my other work. And I wrote it and
I was amazed that I found an agent and amazed that I found a
publisher and really amazed that it sold like
(02:33):
gangbusters. And that came in very
handy because soon after it got published, I got laid off.
Not because of the book, it was just because of the realities of the
business. But that did come in very handy because
we had just bought a new house and so that
big new house with a big new mortgage and I had a newly big
(02:55):
wife, she was seven months pregnant with our second child.
And my book was out there and I began to get phone
calls from people saying, do you do speeches on this
kind of thing? Do you do seminars? And up to then I've been saying no,
I have a job. But that day, the
day after I got laid off, I got a phone call from
(03:18):
someone said do you do speeches about this sort of thing? I said,
why yes I do. And they said, by any chance
are you available on this was in August. So on, I
don't know, October 16th. And this is in pre
Internet days. So I got some
blank pieces of paper and riffled them in front of the phone and said, let
(03:40):
me look at my calendar to see if I'm free. Well, I had the
whole next 10 years free as far as I knew. Well,
yes, that day's open. And that sent me
down a road which I continue to go down for the
next 30 years of consulting
on various technical topics. But the common theme throughout all
(04:03):
of them was how do you communicate more effectively
to get people more highly. And the word that gets used in
the business world more highly engaged in their work
and engagement means in that context
is getting people to give the
incremental bit of effort and energy on the job
(04:26):
because if you don't do it right, they're not inclined to do it. Now I
imagine first responders are pretty,
pretty motivated people or they wouldn't be doing that kind of work.
Yeah, absolutely. But, but I would think though
that if you, if you don't do the communication part
right, you can do some things that
(04:48):
might demotivate cause a little bit of demotivation.
You're not going to turn them off completely because they are motivated people,
but you might cause them to be at the margin a
little bit demotivated and then that would be terrible thing to do in the business
world. It, it often goes the other way. People, a lot of people are
just kind of going through the motions and you need to build them up.
(05:12):
I actually have a story that actually I feel fits
perfectly with that. Okay. I had a
supervisor, that man, I swear me and my best
friend would do the exact same thing and he would get
a commendation. I'd get rode up. For whatever
reason, me and that supervisor just did not mesh up very well.
(05:34):
And I, when I would be was on his
shift, it just demotivated me because
he didn't know how to communicate with me. He was an older
marine from the 80s. And
I wouldn't say that I'm of the younger
generation anymore, but you know, a different generation than him.
(05:56):
Yeah. And there was A clear. And
I recognized that there was a clear communication gap.
And I tried so hard to fix that.
And after a while I finally just gave up because he wasn't,
he wouldn't, will it work with me. And I just gave up
on trying to communicate with him because I knew what the issue was.
(06:20):
There was, there was, there was a generational gap. He was ex
military, I'm not. And
I just could not bridge that gap. And so finally that's
exactly right. I got demotivated and I gave up. Now I didn't stop working
because deep down inside, you know, I have a calling to go
out there and serve the public. But I guarantee I wasn't
(06:42):
as proactive, you know, going out and
trying to find stuff when I was on shift with him. Right. I
had, I had the last 10 years of my career. I was a
consultant for about 30 years, but the last 10 years
I went to, I told, I'd always told my wife, after
(07:03):
years and years of travel as a consultant, I always told my wife,
before I retire, I want to go work, go back to work
for a company to see if,
if the stuff I've been preaching really ticks. Because as a
consultant, you fly in, you might work with a company for a few weeks, for
a few months, maybe even a year, but then you get to leave.
(07:27):
I wanted to see if I could go in and go deep within a company
as just an employee, because as a consultant you also have a little
bit of cachet. The saying in
the consulting business is the expert is the guy who has the
airplane ticket in his pocket. You could come in as
the guy who flies in the hot shot
(07:49):
or whatever. Some people roll their eyes when they say it
with good reason.
And so I got a job with a major
defense contractor. Now these defense
contractors, the management of these defense
contractors tend to be populated by former military.
(08:12):
So at one point while working there, I had
responsibility for leadership development program of a very
large chunk of the business. And so one of the
people that I was counseling
was a retired admiral and good
guy, well intentioned guy, smart guy,
(08:34):
said to me, john, you know, I know what
I want done. I think I'm clear about what I want done.
I tell people what I want done. It doesn't get done in the way I
want it done or as fast as I want it done. And I remember saying
to him, well, Bill, you got to realize that people don't
do what you want them to do in the way you want them to do
(08:56):
it. You can't have them thrown in federal prison anymore.
You've got to use some influence techniques. You can't
just say do it or you're going into the brig,
you know, and you also, you don't want
to play occasionally, not into the brig, but occasionally,
(09:17):
yes. If you're a boss, occasionally you
might want to just simply use your authority to get something
done. But if that's your go to move, you're not going to be very
effective as a leader. Right. You need, you
need to know how to influence people.
So it was because of that and examples like that that
(09:39):
over the years I
learned a fair amount about what worked and what didn't work.
And that's what, you know, you
mentioned that I had written seven books. Matter of fact, I just
published my eighth book. That's awesome. And
(10:01):
it's a very short book. And its title is if
engagement is the what, then respect is the how and
what. It's saying. If what you want is to have your employees more highly engaged,
then about 85% of the battle is treating them with respect
to. And I don't simply say that, but I
talk about what that really means and how you go about doing it and
(10:24):
why if you don't do that, you're going to run into those kind of
roadblocks and pitfalls.
That's. That's so true. And that's
actually something that
for the longest time I felt like in the first responder world that they do,
I didn't recognize is it was
(10:46):
always, well, that's the way we've always done it and that's the way we're going
to continue to do it. I feel like maybe in the last five to 10
years, it's finally started to come out a little bit
of like, hey, if you have five people on your shift as a
supervisor, you've got five different personalities that you have
to manage that probably have five different interests in law
(11:08):
enforcement. And you kind of have to. It's kind of
like baking a cake. You got to put all the ingredients together to make a
good shift and. Yeah, go ahead.
I was just gonna say it's slowly getting better, but
I mean, it's, it's definitely taking a long time.
It's five different interests in law enforcement and
(11:30):
five different life stories. Like again, the
fellow you had on your last episode had
triplets crying in the background. Yes.
I'm 75 years old. You aren't going to hear any triplets crying in the background
in my life. You know what you see over there
is a cat. That's a
(11:53):
sentence I never thought I would utter. I have a cat.
My wife passed away five years ago and I inherited her.
Actually, I have three cats. That's an even less likely sentence. I
thought I would ever. But I don't have triplets. So, I mean,
I have a very different life. You know, I
(12:15):
head up a. I play a lot of golf.
I'm on the board of governors at my golf course. I head up a
committee and I'm trying to pull together a meeting for
my committee. And I'm thinking, well, I'll just pull Everybody together at
10 o' clock in the morning. And then I, oh, wait a minute,
people still work. I can't,
(12:37):
I can't just assume everybody can show up at
one in the afternoon like I can. Why can't they?
You know, and I mean, that's a silly example, but it
is and it isn't. It's just taking a minute to
realize, oh yeah, they have their own lives, they have their own
issues. And everybody, and
(13:01):
everybody has a story to tell. Everybody has some
stuff that's going on in their life that's tough.
That's, you know, that may or may not be any of
your business, but you need to
acknowledge that people are living real
(13:22):
lives and you got to give people a
little bit of slack in the rope so that they can live there, all
that stuff. And, and that's, you
know, I'm almost embarrassed that, that I,
that this stuff, I mean, I'm pointing over here, this is, I
have my, this is my book here, the new one,
(13:47):
and that it's very basic, but, but it's,
I don't hear anybody else saying it quite as directly that just,
I mean, the, the, the definition of respect that I
offer in the book is giving due
consideration to the other. To,
(14:08):
to others. That's all. Other and others.
Others is a loaded word these days. Politically.
You get into a lot of trouble if you say others. Oh, you're gonna,
you're trying to other that person. I'm sure
you're aware of all that. Oh, yeah, I think
(14:28):
I'm okay, because my definition of other in this context
is everybody who isn't you.
I'm not talking about a category, I'm not talking about a
demographic set. I'm talking with just
anybody else giving due consideration
to others. When you, what you say or don't say,
(14:50):
what you do or don't do, did you stop and think about
how it affected others? That's all.
And it's a simple notion. It's very hard to do.
And, and you'll have a much higher chance of doing
it if you. I joke around
with people. I say if you stop, if you take a beat,
(15:14):
maybe take a shot of scotch and think about it,
and that, you know, you're more likely to.
Okay, stop and think. That's all. Just think about. Did
you stop and think? I have.
In my book, I give an example of, of someone who, of
(15:36):
an employee who gets an email from a boss.
And the employee had sent something to the boss via email
that he thought was in response to what the boss
had requested. And the boss had said simply,
not what I was looking for with four exclamation points.
(15:57):
And not. This poor guy now gets this, well,
what's he supposed to do with this? Does he go see the
boss? Well, if he knows the boss well, maybe he can,
he can go and say, hey, you having a bad day? What is this?
But if you don't know him well, maybe he can, you know.
(16:17):
But if the boss had taken a minute and said,
he could have said, not what I was looking for. But then they added a
little bit. I thought we were going to talk
about X, Y and Z. Ah, now the
person. No, okay, now you've given me something to go on. But
because he just blew off steam,
(16:39):
he sent that guy into a swivet. Maybe that
guy had a. Cancel his staff meeting with his people.
And that has a ripple effect throughout the organization. They had to
rearrange their schedules because he
hadn't given due consideration because he had been
disrespectful. And if, if you're not being
(17:02):
respectful of people, why would you think down the
road they're going to give incremental effort and energy? Why do you, why would you
think they're going to be more highly engaged? Exactly.
It's. I was talking to somebody about
this the other day. They said, oh, it's very easy. I said, it's not
(17:22):
easy. It's simple. There's a difference.
Something can be simultaneously simple and difficult.
The notion of giving consideration is a simple notion, but it's
difficult to do in the, in the midst of a day
when you're very busy and you've got your own stresses and
strains. Maybe you're getting flack from your boss,
(17:46):
you know, but you got a better chance of doing it if you keep
that in mind. That's, that's all I, that,
that's all I propose. I agree wholeheartedly.
And that's, you know, and you say it's, you say it's not
a hard topic and it's it is with how simple it is.
But I love it. It's difficult. It's a simple notion, but
(18:09):
it's difficult to do very. Yeah, that's what I was going to get at is
it's, it's something that people just don't grasp
for whatever reason. You know.
I think some people, they, they,
they, I think some people, well, here, these are the worst cases think if
(18:30):
they're higher, then they look at an organizational
chart and they think, well, if, if I'm here and you're
here, I don't need to worry about that. I need
to worry about this up, not down.
And that's cancer.
Organization. What
(18:53):
I was, I was reading some of the, you know, questions that,
you know, intrigue you and
first responders, I mean, I'm not gonna say they're unique, but we have a very
paramilitaristic structure. You know, we have our front line
supervisors and then they have, you know, probably like the next
(19:13):
level above them or the ones that, you know, maybe run the shifts or run
the districts and then you have your administration level supervisors.
What, what's the one leadership skill that
matters the most at each level?
At each level or at all levels? All levels.
(19:35):
All right. I would think
listening and first cousin listening is
empathy and knowing and
knowing. You know, and again, I, I've said
to people, you know, giving due consideration to
the other does not mean you're throwing, you're there to throw rose petals
(19:58):
in people's paths. You got a business to run, you've got a,
you've got a, you've got a first responder organization. And that,
and that is, there are times when it's
literally life and death and they're in time to
go through all kinds of niceties. So I'm not suggesting that
that's why the word do D U e is in there
(20:22):
giving appropriate consideration to the other, due consideration
to the other. But I just think
I, you know, that
one of the, one of the, one of the things you'll hear people talk about
and one of the things I say in the book I offer, I
offer first cousin to respect is
(20:46):
trust. And the definition of
trust that I offer is is
confident expectation that if
everybody knows what to expect, that
means time has been taken to set those expectations
(21:06):
and is confident in that, is confident in what will happen.
If expectations aren't met,
then you can have trust. So for example,
if you, if, if someone in
good faith
(21:28):
does something, doesn't meet expectations,
what's going to happen is the boss is their Boss going to say,
all right, that didn't quite work
out. Let's talk about why that didn't work out. What did you overlook?
What might we have done differently? Let's think about that. That's
(21:49):
one approach. The other approach would be the boss is going to rip
his face off. Now, again,
in some circumstances, the more
the rip your face off response might be the necessary one. If
there's no time to have this soulful
(22:10):
searching and comparing of notes.
But, but confident
expectations is, is the definition of, of
trust that, that I, I suggest. And, and
one of the things I say to people is you, you, you
should not trust people presumptively. I don't,
(22:32):
I don't know. I met you, Brent, 25
minutes ago, right, Virtually. If you and I
were working on a project and I was
a project leader and you said to me, oh, I'll have that
for you by next Friday at, you know, two o' clock.
I'm not going to say, okay, good, I'm not going to check.
(22:55):
I am going to check. Doesn't mean I think you're a bad guy.
Doesn't mean I have any reason to think you won't do it. But I don't
know exactly. We don't have any
experience together. On the other hand, if you and I work together
for five years and you've come through every
(23:15):
single time without fail, and you say, I'll have it
for you by next Friday at 2 o' clock, I'll say,
go with God, do it. We're good,
you know, and so that's why I say trust should not be given
presumptively, but it can be earned. And
so over time, that person who at first I might have said,
(23:39):
I'm going to check over time, okay,
now that person has earned that level of trust that I had. Respect,
on the other hand, is different. Respect
must always be given presumptively. I can think
of nothing more.
More. Arrogant or pompous than saying, you
(24:02):
must earn my respect, you know,
well, who the blank are you to say I have
to earn your, you know, Exactly.
You see, I'm saying I it respect's different. And the other thing that
makes respect different from all these other things is respect
(24:23):
is something that I, John, and you, Brent, have complete
control over. I have complete control over
whether or not I show respect to everybody else I
work with, whether it's the president of the company
or the, or the guy who comes and empties my waste basket or
(24:43):
everybody else in between. I have complete
control over that. And if people who work for me see
me showing respect to everybody up and down
and across the organization, they're more likely
to manifest the same kind of
respect. So it's coming back to the question you asked me a while
(25:06):
ago. I think that
the thing that leaders can do, it's
listen in empathy and manifesting respect
is the thing that's probably most essential
because that, that
(25:27):
propagates through an organization and the lack of it does
too. People pick up on, on.
This is a place where I like this people, I respect that.
They also sense I don't like the way people are treated
here. And
(25:49):
so there's another word that you saw time, Empowerment. You hear
that word? Yes.
I, I in, in a
auditorium and listened to. It was
a large company. They were getting the results
(26:09):
of a survey they had done of their employees,
thousands and thousands of employees. It was a big company
and they asked their employees the extent to which they felt empowered
and the results were very disappointing.
So the president of the company got up after the
(26:30):
results had been reported and there was some discussion about it.
The president company got up and he said, you could tell he was,
he was just, we shook his head and he said, and the people
in the room were his direct reports and their
direct reports. So these were high level people in the
company. He said, I need you people to
(26:52):
understand something. You are all empowered.
I now need you to go back and tell your people, make sure your
people understand that they are empowered, are all empowered.
And I was sitting in the back of the room and I could, from where
I was sitting, I could see a guy in the front row is one of
his vice presidents. He started to put his hand up
(27:16):
and then he pulled it down and then
there was a break. And so during the break I got ahold of that guy
and I said, you wanted to say something. When he said
he told people that he wanted, he wanted you to go and tell people they
were empowered. And he said, yeah, I did. I said, what was it you
wanted to say? He said, what I wanted to say was
(27:38):
we could tell people they're empowered until we're blue in the face. But if they
don't feel empowered, they're not empowered. I said, well, why
didn't you say it? He said, oh no,
too risky. Think of the irony
of that. He didn't feel empowered
to tell his boss that the way he was approaching
(28:00):
empowerment was wrong.
He was not empowered to say that's not the
way to do empowerment. The
definition of empowerment that I suggest in the book is
a feeling of safety while exercising judgment
on the job, a feeling of
(28:24):
safety while exercising judgment. So if you're on the job and you're just going down
a checklist, you don't need to exercise judgment.
But if you're going down the checklist and partway through, you think,
maybe I ought to deviate from this checklist a little bit. Now
you're exercising judgment.
Now you're going to ask yourself, well, what will happen if
(28:47):
I do that and things go south? Now we're back
to the trust thing. Will my boss rip my face off?
Or will he sit me down and say, all right, you did your best, but
all these things fit together.
The way I put it together in the book is respect
(29:08):
will lead to trust. Trust will lead to
empowerment. Empowerment will lead to engagement. But it
all starts with respect and respect. Of all those four things,
respect is the one thing that everybody has complete control
over. Those other things require other
people doing things. You have complete control
(29:31):
over whether or not you give respect to the other.
And that's, that's
the little soapbox that I'm on these days. I love that.
And that's so true. That's actually very spot on.
I love that. I, I have something that
really piqued my interest on here. It says,
(29:54):
how should leaders measure engagement if not through
surveys? Because in the
first responder world, I feel like every once in a while,
these chiefs, especially at bigger agencies, put out these,
you know, surveys to their unions or whoever and say, hey, fill these
out, tell us what's going right, tell us what's going wrong.
(30:17):
And you might get maybe 10% of them to participate.
And the ones that are usually participating are the ones that are like, man, this
is the best place ever. What's your
take on that? Like, what's your take on if not surveys? Like,
what's the best way to get engagement or measure engagement?
Surveys are fine for what they are if you
(30:40):
recognize that. If you're only getting 10% response,
that should tell you that is telling you something important right there.
Yeah. Beyond surveys, if it's possible for you to
do focus groups,
those are harder to do. Surveys are easy to do as we speak.
(31:02):
Today is Monday the 23rd. I mentioned I belong in
my golf club. I,
I'm responsible for our annual member survey. We launched
our annual member survey today. So I
just checked before I got on this call with you. We have 81 responses so
(31:23):
far. It's fine. It's fine. And it will give
us very valuable information. We've been doing this survey for
10 years. We compare it year to year. It's very valuable. We know
what it is, but we also know what it is. I also got an email
from a friend of mine who sends me the same email
every year when the survey goes out. John, why do we keep doing the survey
(31:45):
when we know nothing will come of it? And I always send the
same response back, Paul, you're wrong. We
do listen to the results. Changes do happen as a
result of it. Then he writes back, well, what are the changes? And
I write back, I'm not going to get into that with you, Paul. Have a
nice evening. And then he,
(32:07):
you know, because. But surveys
are fine for what they are. I would,
I would recommend,
if you, if you can manage, a way to do focus groups
that gives you richer, meatier kinds of
(32:27):
information.
I mean, engagement, you know, you should
see things like
employee retention rates. Now, you probably have pretty high retention rates,
but I don't know how big of that issue
that is with you. But absenteeism should go down.
(32:52):
People are more engaged, they want to come to work.
Those are the signs of higher levels of engagement. There
aren't the things you will see in corporate America like profitability up and
productivity up. Well, there are probably some productivity
measures that you could come up with. I don't know what they would be offhand,
but the profitability, No, I
(33:14):
would. Say on productivity wise, a lot of guys just making
contact with people that are, you know, out there committing
crimes and traffic violations, engaging with the
public, guys that are more productive will get out and do that on a
more regular basis. And then guys that are kind of checked out, they're
usually just taking their calls and going home, maybe
(33:37):
checking business properties. So they're not as proactive. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well.
That would be how I would measure it in the first responder world, because
at least on the cop side. But
yeah, I like
(33:58):
focus groups. Would you,
let me ask you this. On the focus group side, would you break it up
with just general officers and then frontline supervisors, or would
you mix them all together? If you're coming from the administration down,
how would you do that?
(34:19):
I, I guess it would depend on what your,
what your objectives are for the focus group. My, my
initial, my gut reaction
would be to keep it at the same level, not mix it, because
that might, might
stifle the discussion. If you have cross,
(34:41):
you know, above different levels. Yep. If you
want to get one level
talking in the different levels and then, and then maybe have the
results of those and circulate those levels and Then bring
together vertical cuts
again. I don't know, I, I, I don't know enough about
(35:03):
it. But, you know, there are various ways to do it.
Those are, you know, those two are, are tricky to do because you do
that and then you also, you wind up getting the notes from
Paul's of the World saying, all right, we did that. Now what?
And, you know, once you ask the question, you're sort of,
(35:27):
you feel obliged to do something with what you found out.
And so I, I
don't want to, I don't want to be too glib about a response to that.
That's fair.
So if I don't want to tie you up all night, but I've had a
blast talking to you. I, I just, I love
(35:49):
that. I'm actually working on my doctorate in leadership right now.
Oh, great. And I just, I love just listening
to you talk about these different ideas because, like, the academic
side of me is like, I could sit here and listen to him talk all
night. You don't want,
you bet. You ought to be careful what you wish for, right?
(36:11):
So if somebody wants to, you know, get in contact with you,
can you give them a little details about your website, where to find your books?
My website is my name. My name's on the screen. My website
is John Gasparry, but all one word, no space between the N and The
G. John GasParry.com. that's my
website. And my books are on the website. And
(36:34):
along with. I, over the years, have written
hundreds and hundreds of articles. They're not
all there, but I went through, I've called through and
have a number of articles on the website.
I also, to keep
(36:54):
myself sane, back in the late 90s and early
2000s, I was on the road a lot.
And to stay sane,
I wrote a weekly humor column for my local
newspaper. That's awesome. Do you know Dave
(37:14):
Berry? I don't. Okay. He's a,
the best humor columnist in America for many, many years.
He wrote for the Miami Herald, syndicated in
500 papers. He was my hero. Anyway, anyway,
anyway, I'm sure I've read. Him at some point because I, I
was on the tail end of the newspaper era. Okay.
(37:38):
He still shows up. You know, you still catch him on,
on websites. He.
So I wrote a weekly humor column in.
I have a pretty good sampling of the humor columns
that I wrote on my website as well, which I think are fun to read.
(38:00):
At least I think they're fun. Here's a real
quick thing. Real quick thing. I don't want to Bore you too much with this.
But Dave Berry, very, very funny writer. He,
I read him for years and he occasionally would write
about. He had a bloodhound named Ernest.
(38:20):
Ernest would show up in his columns from time to time.
Well, we wound up with a basset hound
named Ernie. So I wrote a column
once that mentioned Ernie the basset hound.
And I remember thinking, huh. And this
(38:40):
was pre, pre email days.
I printed out a copy of the
column with Ernie in which I mentioned
Ernie. I actually wrote a fan letter today, but. Wrote
a letter, remember those? Yes. I had to put an
envelope and put a stamp on it. In the
(39:04):
letter I said, dave, just want to say thanks
for many years of many laughs. I know you write about your
bloodhound named Ernest. I wrote the
attached column on which I mentioned my bass and how named Ernie. Thought you might
enjoy it. Sincerely, John Gasparry. Blah blah
blah. Two weeks later I get
(39:26):
a postcard from Miami Herald and all it
said on it was John Woof, Dave
Barry. It's,
it's on the wall four feet over from where I am sitting. Right. It's
one of my prized possession. I love that. That's awesome. Was.
(39:48):
That'S awesome. I want to give you
one thing to close the episode on,
please. Over your long
illustrious career, what's your absolute favorite moment
of like doing everything?
(40:11):
If you had to pick the cherry on top. What's the cherry on top?
In the, in around the year 2000 and
the year 2000, my business partner and
I had done about a
two year consulting project with an insurance company that was based
(40:33):
in Keene, New Hampshire. Keene is a
little town in the lower left hand corner of New Hampshire.
And
when we bid the project, it was just he and
I and you know,
and the name of our company was Gaspari and Salts.
(40:57):
His name was North Salz. And like in the
consulting world you have
stringers who you call on for any given project you
reach out and grab. We need three people, we need five. Everybody knows a bunch
of people who will help out.
So it was a pretty good sized project for us. And we
(41:18):
were going up against two of the big
consulting companies based in Boston. And we were two
little jabronis in and
you know, in suburban Boston.
And it came down to the final dog and
pony show was down to three of us. And I
(41:41):
remember the president of the consulting of the insurance
company said all right, well what can you do for us
that we. How would you work out a billing for us that's on a,
on a contingency basis that is our billing would
be contingent on measurable
(42:02):
results we got for them.
And it was a moment where
I could feel my heart beating because I know I was going
to say no. I knew I was going to say no, but I
couldn't say no, we don't do that. I had a sound,
(42:24):
right? I said, tom, I'm sorry, we don't work on
contingencies. Well, how do we know you have skin in the game?
And I remember looking him in the eye and saying, tom, it's
just Norton. I. All we have is
our reputation. If we do this work for you and
we screw it up, we are screwed.
(42:47):
You will have our effort, you will have
everything we have, but you will not, we
will not do this on a contingency basis.
And we left. And I remember he and I drove home to my partner and
I drove home together and I said, what do you think? And he said, I'm
glad you said that, but I don't know, we may, that might have blown us
(43:07):
out of the water. We got a call the next day that we got the
job. Fast forward two years later.
We had done two years of work with them. It was a huge
success. And
they had like a banquet at the end to like a
celebration of the success of what we had done with
(43:29):
them. It had involved re engineering a bunch of their, of
their work processes and all that. But first
we had gone out with them and interviewed a bunch of
their customers and taught their people how to interview customers
so that it wasn't us coming back. That was another interesting thing,
wasn't us interviewing customers and telling them what customers said.
(43:52):
We said, no, you need to go talk to customers. And these are
people from backroom functions that didn't talk to customers
because we wanted to get the voice of the customer
inculcated throughout the organization. And everybody began to
hear it. And
(44:13):
one of the things that happened was so I, I, I
wrote an article for, for I, I had a
regular monthly space in a business magazine.
I wrote an article about the work we had done and it was
blowing smoke at ourselves about what a wonderful job we had done.
(44:33):
A year later I wrote another article said a year ago I wrote an article
about this job. Well, here's the postscript.
The main thing we had convinced them to do was they had done, they had
had their claim centers regionally. We had
convinced them no, it made more sense to have one national
(44:54):
claim center in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And we convinced them. Then they did that.
About a year later, that claim center burned down.
And we had told him Put everything, put all your eggs in that basket.
But what happened was that
(45:17):
the, the day it happened, the president of the company's got his head in his
hands and he looks up and he's got people from hr, people
from accounting, people from facilities,
people from non customer facing functions in his
doorway saying, how can we help? Because they
had been the people out talking to customers and they recognized how important it
(45:39):
was. And
he said that within 36 hours they
had adjuster centers, claim center,
temporary claim center up and running and had lost virtually
no time. And he said that happened because
of the way we had gone about it with them. That was probably
(46:01):
the most gratifying thing
that, you
know, I knew what we had been doing was good work.
But the picture, through the way he told it, him
looking up and seeing all these people in his doorways saying, how can
(46:21):
we help that moment? You know,
and, and I told you they had the big celebration, the big
banquet. And yes, this is me patting
myself on the back at the end. They went around and said, we did this,
we did that. We accomplished this. Not we, but they
had accomplished this. They had accomplished that. And they said, there's a couple of people
(46:45):
we'd like to thank. And they said, one is North Stalls. That was my business
partner. And then they said, the other is John Gaspari. And
the place rose and gave me a standing ovation because I
had gone around the company and
done a seminar
for every employee in the company to explain why we
(47:07):
were doing what we were doing. And
that consulting engagement was the most gratifying thing I ever
did in my consulting career. That's awesome.
That makes it all work. That was the second most important part of my business
career. The most important thing was I met my wife at Honeywell.
(47:29):
Can't forget that. No, no, you
can't. Married. Married to her for 40 years. That's
awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. Well,
John, you've been a great guest and I would, at
some point, I would love to have you back on. Sure. Because
you were, like I said, you, you were great.
(47:53):
So I will wrap this up, guys. John
Gaspari dot com. He's got his books.
Reach out to him again. He's a wealth of knowledge.
John, thank you. You were awesome. Thank you. Have a good night.
You too.
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