September 19, 2024 • 17 mins
Ready to discover how firefighting lessons from the frontlines can transform your leadership and build a culture of trust, preparedness, and high performance?
In this episode, Nick Bonstell, President & CEO of Miss Dig 811, shares his journey from career firefighter to leading Michigan's excavation safety one-call system.
His transition from being a firefighter to executive leadership taught him the critical value of prevention over reaction. In emergency services, success often comes from proactive measures that prevent crises before they happen - a lesson he carries into his current role at MissDig811.
He emphasizes that his experience in the fire service instilled in him the importance of trust, servant leadership and creating a strong, mission-driven culture - principles that he now applies to leading organizations in both public and private sectors.
"If you can actively create an environment of psychological safety, where people feel safe to voice their concerns and try new things, you’re not just building a team - you’re creating a culture that drives innovation, engagement, and ultimately, success."
Nick discusses the challenges of organizational change, especially in aligning people and processes, and shares actionable insights on how leaders can empower their teams by fostering an environment where everyone feels safe to speak up, make decisions, and contribute to the organization’s mission.
Join us for an enriching conversation packed with practical lessons for leaders across all sectors, designed to inspire and elevate your leadership game.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
William Gladhart (00:00):
Welcome to the Leadership Lovers Podcast.
I'm your host, W Gladheart, cmoat the Culture Think Tank.
At the Culture Think Tank, weempower leaders with metrics
that strengthen culture, driveperformance and return.
We're here today to learn aboutthe actions leaders have taken
to address organizational change.
(00:21):
Our guest today is NickBonstell, president and CEO of
MissDig811.
Thanks for taking the time tojoin us.
Nick Bonstell (00:31):
Well, first of all, thanks for having me and
thanks for all that you do withthis podcast.
I've learned a lot from itmyself, and it's got to be a
pretty fulfilling mission foryou to deliver the information
through your medium of thepodcast as well.
William Gladhart (00:44):
Oh well, thank you for that.
Yeah, we learn a lot.
Leaders learn a lot.
I'm glad you got a few nuggetsout of what we're doing, so
let's start by having you sharea little bit about yourself with
our audience, your backgroundand your organization as well.
Nick Bonstell (00:59):
Oh, excellent.
So thank you.
Like I said before, I reallyappreciate the opportunity to
talk with you today andhopefully some of this
information helps someone elsein the future as well.
Pass it on, that's the best waythat I've always learned to
lead, for sure.
So I'm married.
Actually, today, at the time ofthis recording, is my 19 years
(01:19):
of marriage celebration todayand yeah, yeah, it's gone by
fast.
It's been an amazing journey.
We have three fantastic kidsand they're all involved in
dance and sports and all kindsof things.
You know we have a highschooler and a couple of middle
schoolers, and what I've learnedfrom a lot of people who have
(01:43):
been my mentors over the yearsis definitely to embrace the
season of life that I'm incurrently.
So coaching sports and doing alot of those things to support
our kids as they grow.
It's been a very, very fun rideso far From a leadership
standpoint.
From a work standpoint, onething that will be kind of
interesting is I actuallystarted off my career as a
(02:04):
career firefighter and spent thefirst decade of my career in
the ranks of the men and womenof the City of Grand Rapids,
Michigan, Fire Department.
The last 10 years, I've reallyspent a lot of time in executive
leadership with public andprivate organizations, with a
lot of those lessons that Ilearned over that first 10 years
being able to pass that on toother areas that I learned over
(02:26):
that first 10 years being ableto pass that on to other areas.
Currently I serve as thePresident and CEO for MISDIG 811
, and we are the state ofMichigan's excavation safety
one-call system and ourorganization's mission and I
talk about this every day withour team.
The mission can never beunderstated, but the reason that
we're here, our organization'smission, is to safeguard the
(02:47):
public environment and memberinfrastructure through
educational outreach andadvancement and damage
prevention processes.
So we are the undergroundutility one call for all 10
million of the state of Michiganresidents and every day we come
to work we try to keep peoplesafe through not damaging gas,
electric and other undergroundutilities here in the state of
(03:10):
Michigan.
It's a noble mission.
William Gladhart (03:12):
Yeah, no, I love that.
You certainly.
Managing a state is certainly achallenge in and of itself.
One thing I just wanted tomention before we dive all the
way in is that you had mentionedduring our initial call that,
as you said, spent a lot of timein the firefighter, in the
(03:32):
reactive part of civic andpublic service, and now you are
in the preventative piece, andthat's somewhat what caught my
attention, because I thought itwas really interesting.
You made that comment of makingthat shift to where you're
making a difference beforehand.
I think go ahead if you've gota comment about that.
Nick Bonstell (03:50):
Yeah, and actually it's pretty funny too,
because when you look at theworld of emergency services, and
whether it's through emergencymanagement or being a
firefighter or being a lawenforcement officer, the holy
grail of the investment forthose services is actually on
the front end in the preventionaspect.
(04:11):
If you can actively create afire safety program that
eliminates the ability to haveto respond to structure fires,
that's a win for everyoneinvolved.
And basically that sameframework comes into play with
utility damage prevention.
If you can prevent thoseincidents from occurring, you
don't have to put the public atrisk.
(04:32):
You don't have to put equipmentoperators and men and women in
the field who are working aroundthese services every day at
risk or the general community.
It's a noble cause and a noblemission that we have to be able
to try to actively prevent thoseincidents.
Every day that our team comesto work, they're literally
saving lives throughcoordination.
William Gladhart (04:53):
That's amazing .
So, as we start ourconversation today, can you
share why you believe a healthyculture is critical?
Nick Bonstell (05:00):
Yeah, I sure can.
I think any high performing atleast the way I look at it and
through the years I've talked toa lot of different
organizations is there is adirect relationship between how
healthy a organization's cultureis to how that organization is
performing.
I think you would be very hardpressed to find a organization
(05:21):
that's at the top of their gamedoing awesome things, who you
talk to someone in theorganization and they're telling
you that the culture is justhorrible to work in.
It's actually quite theopposite.
Usually those are the peoplewho are very excited to tell you
about what they do.
They're engaged in the workthat they do every day.
They feel a sense of purposewhen they come to work.
One of the big things is thatall high-performing
(05:44):
organizations havehigh-performance cultures, so
culture is really everything.
It's a foundation.
Where I learned a lot aboutculture and where I started to
really understand the impactthat culture plays is really
back to my fire service roots,and I learned a couple pretty
interesting leadership lessonsthere from those days.
(06:04):
One of them is the fact thatyou have leaders who literally
are brought up to eat last, sowhen everyone's gathering around
a big meal, they are the lastones to sit down and that is
really the servant form ofleadership that leads to a
healthy culture that says arethe last ones to sit down, and
that is really the servant formof leadership that leads to a
healthy culture that says we'rehere to serve you.
It's a organization that's gotorigins and service and what
(06:28):
that leads to is a reallyincreased relationship of trust,
even to a point where, in thosecases, that person who's right
next to you, you are going totrust with your life and you're
going to verify that throughtraining, you're going to verify
that through the way youinteract.
But in the end of the day, whenit's two o'clock in the morning
(06:49):
and the bell goes off, thatperson you have to trust with
your life.
So the culture is probablynever as more important as in
those cases where you have totrust that person on a whim with
your life.
So, taking a lot of thoselessons learned, learning how
really the mission and thealignment with people and their
(07:10):
personal values, how thosepersonal values align with the
culture that is in anorganization, those are what
really drives winning teams, andthe winning teams, the teams
that win, are the teams thatdefinitely have a really healthy
culture, and I think it'sabsolutely critical to
everything we do.
I'll even put it up on apedestal and say that it is the
(07:32):
number one thing.
If you are not taking the timeto nurture the culture within
your organization, in the endthat's going to lead to process
problems, that's going to leadto problems with profit, that's
going to lead to problems downthe road.
So we first have to take careof the people who take care of
our customers and take care ofthe teams that we support.
William Gladhart (07:53):
Absolutely.
I love that you wrapped in thattrust factor, the communication
element, but also that you kindof brought to light about all
the different components whichtouch on our next question about
people process or profits.
So it's been our experiencethat leaders struggle with three
key areas, as noted peopleprocess or profits.
(08:13):
In your role as CEO, could youidentify which one of these
three areas represented acultural challenge within your
own organization?
Nick Bonstell (08:22):
Yeah, I think probably every CEO out there
could probably draw conclusionsfrom each three of these areas,
and I don't think there's ever aday in a CEO's life where
you're like, okay, we're good,we really don't have anything to
focus on today.
So there's always theopportunity to improve in all
three of these areas.
And I'll say for myself andI'll just kind of walk through
(08:44):
my own personal journey is, youknow, I'm within my first year
here, within Mystic 811.
It's been a very, very funjourney for me to come into an
organization that I've workedwith from the outside but I've
never really interacted with onthe inside.
And one of the very firstthings that I did is set some
(09:05):
time to just assess currentconditions and not dive into
throwing everything out andreinventing everything, because
there's a lot of good thingsthat are working in the right
direction.
So what I was able to do in thefirst 90 days is we have 72
team members statewide.
What I did was in the first 90days, I did one-on-ones with
(09:29):
every single one of those folksand I learned all about what
encourages, what do they like todo on the engagement side, what
are they interested in, whatare their passions, what are
their pursuits in life, and thatgives me a really good
understanding on the people sideas to where I need to focus and
what I need to build and what Ineed to create as far as a
(09:50):
situation to set the culture tohave a lot of engagement for the
future.
And one of the things that Idid learn in this process was
the importance of and I know wetalk about this quite a bit
nowadays, but for me it is veryimportant is psychological
safety, and I truly feel thatit's on us as leaders in any
(10:13):
organization to create theenvironment where people feel
safe enough to voice theirconcerns, safe enough to voice
when they think something isunsafe, safe enough and daring
enough to try new things andreally make decisions and not
wait for people to makedecisions.
(10:43):
So for me, my number one goalwas role.
I had worked as a leader insafety and emergency management
within a natural gas utility andone of the things that we
increased in that role was ourability to conduct lessons
learned from incidentinvestigations.
So if you think about likeincident investigations, there's
two ways that you can take that.
One is it can be a punitiveprocess, or two, as an
(11:07):
organization, you can build aculture and say, hey, every time
we have one of these, we'regoing to learn something from it
.
And the way that we're going tolearn something from it is
we're going to have the peoplewho were directly involved with
this teach us, tell us exactlywhat went wrong, tell us exactly
what we need to learn from.
Well, in order to do that, youhave to create a really deep
(11:27):
foundation of psychologicalsafety Because, as you know,
will not everyone's just goingto raise their hand and say yeah
, let me tell you where I mighthave messed up in this process.
So, it took a few years toreally build that foundation.
It was not something that justoccurred overnight, but what a
beautiful thing when it does.
(11:48):
And all of a sudden, the teamstarts to rally around.
Hey, when we have theseincidents and when we do these
after action reviews, we want tobe engaged and instead of
waiting for us to put themtogether, they're putting them
together themselves anddocumenting the lessons learned
from those actions.
For me, I took that lesson andI brought it over to our current
(12:08):
role and I'm really working todevelop that deep foundation of
psychological safety and makingsure that we create a platform
and environment where everyonecan move this organization
forward, because it's not juston me, it's on all of us to come
up with the great ideas thatare going to be the next big
thing in what we do.
William Gladhart (12:29):
Yeah, I think you definitely identified that
the one challenge was reallyaround the people, but also the
process, psychological safety,etc.
How did you, as the leader, goabout developing that that
impacted your culture positively?
Nick Bonstell (12:44):
Yeah, and I think this goes right back to another
term that gets thrown out a lot, but it's really servant
leadership.
And I'll go right back to theroots.
A lot of people think when theylook at fire service
organizations, you know theylook at that organization as
really an older style top-downmanagement structure.
(13:04):
But really what they don'tunderstand about how that is
actually done in an emergencyfield is the training and the
relationships and the trust andeverything that's built ahead of
time turns into very broaddelegation and it's very not
task-oriented.
So you might be given anoverall objective to complete,
(13:28):
but you're figuring out thetactics of how you get to create
and finalize.
That objective is we want toreally embrace the ability for
each of our members, each of thepeople who build this
organization, each of the peoplewho come to work every day, to
(13:50):
really make decisions and toreally have the ability to be
close to our customers, be closeto our stakeholders and not
have to go through largeprocesses to really get a
decision made.
I think when we do that itleads to increased engagement,
it leads to the ability forthose folks to align closer to
(14:12):
our mission and it justincreases the attentiveness and
the impact on our culture.
So for me it's not the overalldirecting and definitely, if
we're all looking at me forevery single answer, we're going
to be in a world of problemshere Will.
So that's why we have really,really smart people who are
(14:34):
well-trained and we continue tolet them do the good
decision-making, and they arethe ones closest to the problem
in many cases.
William Gladhart (14:44):
I love that you speak about empowering your
organization, empowering otherleaders, but also sharing that
message across the board interms of psychological safety,
helping others understand thatthey have ownership in the
mission, the identity of theorganization, and moving that
needle forward.
So, as we wrap up today, isthere anything else you'd like
to share for fellow leaders?
Nick Bonstell (15:06):
Well, I think you know, I would say, whether it's
a fellow leader or whether it'sa person who's inspiring to
maybe move into a role in afuture organization to where
they can have, you know, largescale impact across the
organization.
I would say that, for me,large-scale impact across the
organization.
I would say that, for me, whatfires me up every day, what
(15:33):
brings me into jumping out ofbed in the morning to basically
come into work, is the fact thatI have a unique opportunity to
better the lives of all of ourteam members here, and some of
the proudest moments that I'veever had in life are when
someone either grows a new taskor skill and whether they stay
with the organization or move on, I see them and their families
achieve more and do better, andthere's no better feeling that
(15:56):
any leader can have.
So, whether you're a fellowleader or one that's growing
into different roles, it's allabout the people and it's all
about the lives that you impact,whether it's inside the
organization or the stakeholdersthat your organization touches.
So just always keep that inmind.
You know that we are in uniquepositions and we should always
(16:18):
be full of gratitude that we arein a unique position to impact
people's lives in a verypositive manner.
William Gladhart (16:24):
Yeah, so, Nick , I've enjoyed having you on our
Leadership Levers podcast.
Thank you so much for yourinsights.
All right, thank you Will.
Thank you for joining us on theLeadership Levers Podcast.
Find all our Leadership Leversepisodes on the Culture Think
Tank website at www.
theculturethink tank.
com or listen on your favoritestreaming platform.
(16:50):
We'd love to hear from youabout the challenges you have
faced as a leader.
Tune in weekly as we inviteleaders to share their
experiences in strengtheningculture and performance, one
action at a time.
Welcome to the Leadership Lovers Podcast.
I'm your host, W Gladheart, cmoat the Culture Think Tank.
At the Culture Think Tank, weempower leaders with metrics
that strengthen culture, driveperformance and return.
We're here today to learn aboutthe actions leaders have taken
to address organizational change.
(00:21):
Our guest today is NickBonstell, president and CEO of
MissDig811.
Thanks for taking the time tojoin us.
Nick Bonstell (00:31):
Well, first of all, thanks for having me and
thanks for all that you do withthis podcast.
I've learned a lot from itmyself, and it's got to be a
pretty fulfilling mission foryou to deliver the information
through your medium of thepodcast as well.
William Gladhart (00:44):
Oh well, thank you for that.
Yeah, we learn a lot.
Leaders learn a lot.
I'm glad you got a few nuggetsout of what we're doing, so
let's start by having you sharea little bit about yourself with
our audience, your backgroundand your organization as well.
Nick Bonstell (00:59):
Oh, excellent.
So thank you.
Like I said before, I reallyappreciate the opportunity to
talk with you today andhopefully some of this
information helps someone elsein the future as well.
Pass it on, that's the best waythat I've always learned to
lead, for sure.
So I'm married.
Actually, today, at the time ofthis recording, is my 19 years
(01:19):
of marriage celebration todayand yeah, yeah, it's gone by
fast.
It's been an amazing journey.
We have three fantastic kidsand they're all involved in
dance and sports and all kindsof things.
You know we have a highschooler and a couple of middle
schoolers, and what I've learnedfrom a lot of people who have
(01:43):
been my mentors over the yearsis definitely to embrace the
season of life that I'm incurrently.
So coaching sports and doing alot of those things to support
our kids as they grow.
It's been a very, very fun rideso far From a leadership
standpoint.
From a work standpoint, onething that will be kind of
interesting is I actuallystarted off my career as a
(02:04):
career firefighter and spent thefirst decade of my career in
the ranks of the men and womenof the City of Grand Rapids,
Michigan, Fire Department.
The last 10 years, I've reallyspent a lot of time in executive
leadership with public andprivate organizations, with a
lot of those lessons that Ilearned over that first 10 years
being able to pass that on toother areas that I learned over
(02:26):
that first 10 years being ableto pass that on to other areas.
Currently I serve as thePresident and CEO for MISDIG 811
, and we are the state ofMichigan's excavation safety
one-call system and ourorganization's mission and I
talk about this every day withour team.
The mission can never beunderstated, but the reason that
we're here, our organization'smission, is to safeguard the
(02:47):
public environment and memberinfrastructure through
educational outreach andadvancement and damage
prevention processes.
So we are the undergroundutility one call for all 10
million of the state of Michiganresidents and every day we come
to work we try to keep peoplesafe through not damaging gas,
electric and other undergroundutilities here in the state of
(03:10):
Michigan.
It's a noble mission.
William Gladhart (03:12):
Yeah, no, I love that.
You certainly.
Managing a state is certainly achallenge in and of itself.
One thing I just wanted tomention before we dive all the
way in is that you had mentionedduring our initial call that,
as you said, spent a lot of timein the firefighter, in the
(03:32):
reactive part of civic andpublic service, and now you are
in the preventative piece, andthat's somewhat what caught my
attention, because I thought itwas really interesting.
You made that comment of makingthat shift to where you're
making a difference beforehand.
I think go ahead if you've gota comment about that.
Nick Bonstell (03:50):
Yeah, and actually it's pretty funny too,
because when you look at theworld of emergency services, and
whether it's through emergencymanagement or being a
firefighter or being a lawenforcement officer, the holy
grail of the investment forthose services is actually on
the front end in the preventionaspect.
(04:11):
If you can actively create afire safety program that
eliminates the ability to haveto respond to structure fires,
that's a win for everyoneinvolved.
And basically that sameframework comes into play with
utility damage prevention.
If you can prevent thoseincidents from occurring, you
don't have to put the public atrisk.
(04:32):
You don't have to put equipmentoperators and men and women in
the field who are working aroundthese services every day at
risk or the general community.
It's a noble cause and a noblemission that we have to be able
to try to actively prevent thoseincidents.
Every day that our team comesto work, they're literally
saving lives throughcoordination.
William Gladhart (04:53):
That's amazing .
So, as we start ourconversation today, can you
share why you believe a healthyculture is critical?
Nick Bonstell (05:00):
Yeah, I sure can.
I think any high performing atleast the way I look at it and
through the years I've talked toa lot of different
organizations is there is adirect relationship between how
healthy a organization's cultureis to how that organization is
performing.
I think you would be very hardpressed to find a organization
(05:21):
that's at the top of their gamedoing awesome things, who you
talk to someone in theorganization and they're telling
you that the culture is justhorrible to work in.
It's actually quite theopposite.
Usually those are the peoplewho are very excited to tell you
about what they do.
They're engaged in the workthat they do every day.
They feel a sense of purposewhen they come to work.
One of the big things is thatall high-performing
(05:44):
organizations havehigh-performance cultures, so
culture is really everything.
It's a foundation.
Where I learned a lot aboutculture and where I started to
really understand the impactthat culture plays is really
back to my fire service roots,and I learned a couple pretty
interesting leadership lessonsthere from those days.
(06:04):
One of them is the fact thatyou have leaders who literally
are brought up to eat last, sowhen everyone's gathering around
a big meal, they are the lastones to sit down and that is
really the servant form ofleadership that leads to a
healthy culture that says arethe last ones to sit down, and
that is really the servant formof leadership that leads to a
healthy culture that says we'rehere to serve you.
It's a organization that's gotorigins and service and what
(06:28):
that leads to is a reallyincreased relationship of trust,
even to a point where, in thosecases, that person who's right
next to you, you are going totrust with your life and you're
going to verify that throughtraining, you're going to verify
that through the way youinteract.
But in the end of the day, whenit's two o'clock in the morning
(06:49):
and the bell goes off, thatperson you have to trust with
your life.
So the culture is probablynever as more important as in
those cases where you have totrust that person on a whim with
your life.
So, taking a lot of thoselessons learned, learning how
really the mission and thealignment with people and their
(07:10):
personal values, how thosepersonal values align with the
culture that is in anorganization, those are what
really drives winning teams, andthe winning teams, the teams
that win, are the teams thatdefinitely have a really healthy
culture, and I think it'sabsolutely critical to
everything we do.
I'll even put it up on apedestal and say that it is the
(07:32):
number one thing.
If you are not taking the timeto nurture the culture within
your organization, in the endthat's going to lead to process
problems, that's going to leadto problems with profit, that's
going to lead to problems downthe road.
So we first have to take careof the people who take care of
our customers and take care ofthe teams that we support.
William Gladhart (07:53):
Absolutely.
I love that you wrapped in thattrust factor, the communication
element, but also that you kindof brought to light about all
the different components whichtouch on our next question about
people process or profits.
So it's been our experiencethat leaders struggle with three
key areas, as noted peopleprocess or profits.
(08:13):
In your role as CEO, could youidentify which one of these
three areas represented acultural challenge within your
own organization?
Nick Bonstell (08:22):
Yeah, I think probably every CEO out there
could probably draw conclusionsfrom each three of these areas,
and I don't think there's ever aday in a CEO's life where
you're like, okay, we're good,we really don't have anything to
focus on today.
So there's always theopportunity to improve in all
three of these areas.
And I'll say for myself andI'll just kind of walk through
(08:44):
my own personal journey is, youknow, I'm within my first year
here, within Mystic 811.
It's been a very, very funjourney for me to come into an
organization that I've workedwith from the outside but I've
never really interacted with onthe inside.
And one of the very firstthings that I did is set some
(09:05):
time to just assess currentconditions and not dive into
throwing everything out andreinventing everything, because
there's a lot of good thingsthat are working in the right
direction.
So what I was able to do in thefirst 90 days is we have 72
team members statewide.
What I did was in the first 90days, I did one-on-ones with
(09:29):
every single one of those folksand I learned all about what
encourages, what do they like todo on the engagement side, what
are they interested in, whatare their passions, what are
their pursuits in life, and thatgives me a really good
understanding on the people sideas to where I need to focus and
what I need to build and what Ineed to create as far as a
(09:50):
situation to set the culture tohave a lot of engagement for the
future.
And one of the things that Idid learn in this process was
the importance of and I know wetalk about this quite a bit
nowadays, but for me it is veryimportant is psychological
safety, and I truly feel thatit's on us as leaders in any
(10:13):
organization to create theenvironment where people feel
safe enough to voice theirconcerns, safe enough to voice
when they think something isunsafe, safe enough and daring
enough to try new things andreally make decisions and not
wait for people to makedecisions.
(10:43):
So for me, my number one goalwas role.
I had worked as a leader insafety and emergency management
within a natural gas utility andone of the things that we
increased in that role was ourability to conduct lessons
learned from incidentinvestigations.
So if you think about likeincident investigations, there's
two ways that you can take that.
One is it can be a punitiveprocess, or two, as an
(11:07):
organization, you can build aculture and say, hey, every time
we have one of these, we'regoing to learn something from it
.
And the way that we're going tolearn something from it is
we're going to have the peoplewho were directly involved with
this teach us, tell us exactlywhat went wrong, tell us exactly
what we need to learn from.
Well, in order to do that, youhave to create a really deep
(11:27):
foundation of psychologicalsafety Because, as you know,
will not everyone's just goingto raise their hand and say yeah
, let me tell you where I mighthave messed up in this process.
So, it took a few years toreally build that foundation.
It was not something that justoccurred overnight, but what a
beautiful thing when it does.
(11:48):
And all of a sudden, the teamstarts to rally around.
Hey, when we have theseincidents and when we do these
after action reviews, we want tobe engaged and instead of
waiting for us to put themtogether, they're putting them
together themselves anddocumenting the lessons learned
from those actions.
For me, I took that lesson andI brought it over to our current
(12:08):
role and I'm really working todevelop that deep foundation of
psychological safety and makingsure that we create a platform
and environment where everyonecan move this organization
forward, because it's not juston me, it's on all of us to come
up with the great ideas thatare going to be the next big
thing in what we do.
William Gladhart (12:29):
Yeah, I think you definitely identified that
the one challenge was reallyaround the people, but also the
process, psychological safety,etc.
How did you, as the leader, goabout developing that that
impacted your culture positively?
Nick Bonstell (12:44):
Yeah, and I think this goes right back to another
term that gets thrown out a lot, but it's really servant
leadership.
And I'll go right back to theroots.
A lot of people think when theylook at fire service
organizations, you know theylook at that organization as
really an older style top-downmanagement structure.
(13:04):
But really what they don'tunderstand about how that is
actually done in an emergencyfield is the training and the
relationships and the trust andeverything that's built ahead of
time turns into very broaddelegation and it's very not
task-oriented.
So you might be given anoverall objective to complete,
(13:28):
but you're figuring out thetactics of how you get to create
and finalize.
That objective is we want toreally embrace the ability for
each of our members, each of thepeople who build this
organization, each of the peoplewho come to work every day, to
(13:50):
really make decisions and toreally have the ability to be
close to our customers, be closeto our stakeholders and not
have to go through largeprocesses to really get a
decision made.
I think when we do that itleads to increased engagement,
it leads to the ability forthose folks to align closer to
(14:12):
our mission and it justincreases the attentiveness and
the impact on our culture.
So for me it's not the overalldirecting and definitely, if
we're all looking at me forevery single answer, we're going
to be in a world of problemshere Will.
So that's why we have really,really smart people who are
(14:34):
well-trained and we continue tolet them do the good
decision-making, and they arethe ones closest to the problem
in many cases.
William Gladhart (14:44):
I love that you speak about empowering your
organization, empowering otherleaders, but also sharing that
message across the board interms of psychological safety,
helping others understand thatthey have ownership in the
mission, the identity of theorganization, and moving that
needle forward.
So, as we wrap up today, isthere anything else you'd like
to share for fellow leaders?
Nick Bonstell (15:06):
Well, I think you know, I would say, whether it's
a fellow leader or whether it'sa person who's inspiring to
maybe move into a role in afuture organization to where
they can have, you know, largescale impact across the
organization.
I would say that, for me,large-scale impact across the
organization.
I would say that, for me, whatfires me up every day, what
(15:33):
brings me into jumping out ofbed in the morning to basically
come into work, is the fact thatI have a unique opportunity to
better the lives of all of ourteam members here, and some of
the proudest moments that I'veever had in life are when
someone either grows a new taskor skill and whether they stay
with the organization or move on, I see them and their families
achieve more and do better, andthere's no better feeling that
(15:56):
any leader can have.
So, whether you're a fellowleader or one that's growing
into different roles, it's allabout the people and it's all
about the lives that you impact,whether it's inside the
organization or the stakeholdersthat your organization touches.
So just always keep that inmind.
You know that we are in uniquepositions and we should always
(16:18):
be full of gratitude that we arein a unique position to impact
people's lives in a verypositive manner.
William Gladhart (16:24):
Yeah, so, Nick , I've enjoyed having you on our
Leadership Levers podcast.
Thank you so much for yourinsights.
All right, thank you Will.
Thank you for joining us on theLeadership Levers Podcast.
Find all our Leadership Leversepisodes on the Culture Think
Tank website at www.
theculturethink tank.
com or listen on your favoritestreaming platform.
(16:50):
We'd love to hear from youabout the challenges you have
faced as a leader.
Tune in weekly as we inviteleaders to share their
experiences in strengtheningculture and performance, one
action at a time.
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