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Steve Baue on 51 Percent Happiness, Unofficial Feeder Programs, and Self-Care for Leaders
65 Plays1 year ago
Steve Baue (stevebaue.com, bauemg.com), CEO and owner of Wisconsin’s premier mental wellness/mental health benefit company, keynote speaker and executive coach, joins host Dan Freehling (contempusleadership.com) to discuss his unique approach to business and leadership. Steve emphasizes his focus on building high-quality companies that serve their clients, employees, and communities. He prioritizes employee happiness, aiming for them to be at least 51% happy with their work. Steve imagines the future of the mental health field, highlighting the potential impact of technology and increasing openness around mental health. He believes that in the future, mental health will be treated with the same urgency and importance as physical health. Steve prepares his organizations for change by investing in employee development and ensuring that they are ready to adapt to new challenges. He also emphasizes the importance of explaining the “why” behind tasks and decisions, as it helps to motivate and engage employees. Steve draws inspiration from various sources, including books, self-care practices, and hobbies such as woodworking and meditation. He believes that taking care of oneself is crucial for effective leadership. Recommended reading: “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” by Mike Michalowicz and “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek.
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Transcript
Introduction to Forward Looking Leadership
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Forward Looking Leadership, a podcast for visionary executives building future ready organizations. I'm your host, Dan Freeling. I'm the founder of Contempos Leadership, a coaching practice that helps organizations develop their leadership pipeline through virtually unlimited coaching for their top rising talent.
Meet Steve Bowie
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm honored to be joined today by Steve Bowie. Steve is the CEO and owner of Wisconsin's premier mental health and mental wellness benefit company.
00:00:26
Speaker
He is also a professional speaker specializing in leadership and mental health topics, as well as a sought after executive coach. Steve is a wealth of business knowledge, having worked for over 20 years at two international market leading companies, overseeing global organizational and leadership development and human resources functions at an executive level. Steve and I did our coaching training together and I've come to consider him a trusted friend and thought partner on all things leadership, management and coaching. Thanks for joining me on Forward Looking Leadership, Steve.
00:00:55
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Dan. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Business Approach and Culture
00:01:00
Speaker
First question for you, Steve, what are some ways that you think about business that differ from how other CEOs might think about it? We're jumping right into the deep end. Let's go for it.
00:01:12
Speaker
Great question. I don't know if this is different, but I got a couple of guiding principles that I use. As you mentioned, I worked for two big international companies, but now I bought a company nine years ago and then I've started four more. I would say two of the biggest
00:01:36
Speaker
things that I'm doing that I think are not common with CEOs. The first one is I have no aspirations in becoming a huge company. There's kind of this hustle culture right now. It's like get started, grow big, use your free time, put it back in the business, disappear for six months and come back changed.
00:01:58
Speaker
I just want to have a good company. And I want to do right by our clients. We do mental health counseling primarily in our companies. I want to do right by them. I want to do right by the customers that we've contracted with. I want to do right by my employees. I want to serve the communities that we're in. And I don't think being big is necessarily the right way to do that. And so if you take all the revenue from my companies, we're less than $5 million.
00:02:27
Speaker
Am I okay being 10 million in revenue sure, but I don't want to get there tomorrow The the I think the term they're using now for the small Giants right companies that are choosing to remain smaller and really focusing on culture and
00:02:44
Speaker
and delivering a superior service and that's what I'm focused on. The growth surprisingly is taking care of itself. I don't have to worry about growth because listen, we're like everywhere else. You know, salaries have to go up, should go up. Things cost more than they did a year ago. So we need growth. I just don't want growth for growth's sake. So that's the first thing.
51% Happiness Rule
00:03:09
Speaker
I would say the second thing that's probably different from a lot of CEOs is I have the 51% happy rule, which is I tell my employees on average, not daily, but over a week, a month, whatever that time frame is, I want them to be able to say they're 51% happy with the work that they're doing. You might call that passionate, you might call that fulfillment.
00:03:37
Speaker
but I think everyone deserves to be happy in their job. And in an eight hour day, if you're not happy four hours and 10 minutes of that, I think there's something wrong with that. We spend more time working than we do everything else. So I tell my employees, I make sure my leadership is asking this question of saying, are you averaging above 51%?
00:04:03
Speaker
Because every job, the reason why it's 51, every job has a component or components that you're not going to get fulfilled from, that you're not going to necessarily enjoy. I'm a CEO of my own companies and there's things I don't want to do, but collectively, if we can get above the 51%, that means someone's going home, I think, having had a good day.
00:04:26
Speaker
What happens when it dips a blow? 51%? I want them to tell us that. I want them to say, listen, today or this past week has been really rough. Because then we can say, OK, is there something we can do? Is there tweaks that we can do for your job? Was it just an off week? Or is there a history of this?
00:04:47
Speaker
We're a small company or small companies, I should say. There's only so much that we can do because of our size. But it'd be surprising sometimes when you're creative what you can do to make someone's job more fulfilling for them. If we can't do it, then we actively say, OK, well, then maybe we should consider you finding you something else. And that's not a bad thing. And I think that's really where this is different from other companies.
00:05:13
Speaker
is that if someone isn't that 51% happy or fulfilled or passionate, then let's go find you the job that can. And the benefit of doing that is, first of all, your employees are a lot more transparent with you. You get a much better vibe in terms of what the culture is and how people are feeling and what they're doing within their jobs.
00:05:37
Speaker
Second thing is that if they say, yeah, maybe this isn't the right place, you have some knowledge then, you have some clue, you're not surprised when all of a sudden an employee hands in their resignation someday, you can kind of help manage that process. And then third, ultimately, you're helping a real human being find something that they will find happiness.
00:05:59
Speaker
And I find that when we do help, and we've done that a couple of times, that's paid back amazing dividends in terms of how that employee talks about us, how our remaining employees look at us. We remove that fear of an employee being honest with us about their job. So I'd say those two things are probably a little different than what some other CEOs might be doing.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds that way. And it's pretty amazing that that's actually that much different than how a lot of people think about business. So the small giants and the 51% happiness, those are really practical, implementable ideas to keep in mind for people. Thanks to you.
00:06:41
Speaker
Well, I will tell you with both of those, you gotta have to discount your ego a little bit, right? Because we live in a society that supposedly bigger is better. And you have to be able to say, no, I'm okay being smaller. And you also have to be in that 51% okay with an employee saying you're not the end all beat all place to work. But in both cases, I think if you're really honest,
00:07:09
Speaker
bigger doesn't mean better. We've seen supposedly great big companies fail and fail hard. And we've seen companies culture be torn apart because a couple employees also in one day said, I don't like it here anymore. Yeah, that focus on the quality is really coming through and subsuming the ego to be able to do that is really incredible.
AI and Mental Health
00:07:31
Speaker
Steve, for the mental wellness company in particular, how do you see your field changing over the next five to 10 years?
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's like every other company right now. We're looking at AI and chat GBT and these technology advances. Part of me says, listen, this is the new thing, right? So it's shiny and new and everyone's putting all this time and energy and all this what ifs about it. And reality may not end up being what we think it's going to be.
00:08:02
Speaker
But at the same time, when you work in a field that is very human driven, mental health is all about sitting in a room, making a connection, diving deep. It's very similar to the executive coaching that you and I do. You don't know where that session's gonna be. So how do we look at technology, not as a threat, but as a tool, as an aid?
00:08:30
Speaker
So, you know, if I were to look out five years from now, my guess is right now and kind of the way we're leaning towards that those technology is going to allow us to amass a lot of information before we get in the room with somebody.
00:08:49
Speaker
There's a thing called the intake and the intake is normally the first session. What do you want to talk about? Why are you here? Where do you want to get to? What's your goal from this? I think the technologies allow us to get that information in a better way that allows people to really elaborate without having to look at a clock.
00:09:13
Speaker
and be able to take that information so that when a counseling session occurs, we're able to get to the heart of the issue much faster. I also see it on the backend of then support tools and behaviors and things that they do after the session now being supported, not necessarily directly by the counselor, but tools that the counselor has at their disposal. So it creates a much richer ecosystem
00:09:41
Speaker
Because right now it's show up, go through a 50 minute session and leave. And there might be a little thing before you come in, a little thing after. But I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna see the world open up and a much larger ecosystem occur around mental health.
00:09:58
Speaker
With that said, the other thing is every generation that's coming into the workplace is much more transparent than the last about their mental health. And so we are seeing it. We've seen it over the nine years that I've owned this company of people being talking about their mental health, prioritizing their mental health.
00:10:17
Speaker
um, seeking tools and resources. So I've always said, you know, what, what happens the day when we treat our mental health, like we treat our physical health, you know, that there's urgent care and there's, you know, your doctors and you go once a year for your annual checkup and all this other stuff. What is the field ready for that type of demand? When we get to that ideal point of that, where we see no difference between our physical and mental health.
00:10:47
Speaker
That's really fascinating. So the tech, not as a replacement for the human element, but as a sort of wraparound and being able to replace some of the elements that you would just show up to a session and do, and then even that increase in demand and acceptance for mental health. I've noticed that in my coaching. So you know that I work mostly with millennial leaders too. And I've noticed, I think that's the vast majority of my clients are very open about working with a therapist concurrently with the coaching. And it's just such a shift from how it's been.
00:11:17
Speaker
I think there's another part too, and I've talked to a couple, you know, coaches that are, you know, at the professional PCC level of coaching, you know, the top tier coaches, and they've been doing it for decades. They're starting to see that Venn diagram of coaching and counseling starting to overlap more.
00:11:37
Speaker
I think in some cases that's a positive. In some cases, I think it's a little dangerous if it's not done with kind of a eyes wide open approach. But you're absolutely right. I always have to tell people, I own two mental health companies. I'm not a counselor. I'm a coach, but I'm not a counselor. And there is a definitive line between those two things.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, I have a good sense of that line just for the other listeners. How do you envision that line? Well, someone once said it this way, and rightly or wrongly, I like it. Coaching is a go-forward process. Where are you at right now? Where do you want to get to? And let's talk about the steps or what's involved in getting you there. Counseling tends to say, here's where you are. How did you get here?
00:12:34
Speaker
What are those things that have occurred and what are the things that you're carrying that may be holding you back from where you want to be today?
00:12:43
Speaker
And I find that to be a really good kind of litmus test when I do my coaching and I, and when I use coaching as this could be any leader is a coach to be able to say, listen, if it's a go forward, I can help you there. But if we're going to start digging up onto the past, there's people that are licensed and trained to do so. Cause let's face it. There's some stuff sometimes in those closets that we are not equipped to deal with as coaches.
00:13:10
Speaker
That's the exact breakdown I've heard in the past and really apply as well. And I do think when you can have both a coach and a therapist or some other mental health professional working with someone at the same time, it can really be great because they can do both that past work and that future looking work. And I've had clients work with my counselors
00:13:38
Speaker
And I tell them, listen, there is a brick wall between my coaching practice and me owning mental health companies. Um, if you end up talking, working with one of my counselors, they don't tell me what's happening in your session. Uh, I don't ask, uh, they don't ask me what's happening and coaching the connection point is the client, the client themselves. Yeah. Right. They share what they want with each party.
00:14:07
Speaker
But I make sure that from my standpoint, there is a brick wall between the two of them. And I think that works really well.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, that seems spot on up to there. So let's get really speculative here. I asked about the next five or 10 years of the future of your fields, especially for the mental wellness one, but feel free to take this in whatever direction. But what about 50 years out? What kind of changes do you foresee or even imagine might be possible? Yeah, that is
00:14:41
Speaker
The beauty of that is you can't be wrong. Exactly. Because I'm not going to be around, probably. That'd make me 103. Who knows? You could do it. If we talk about mental health, which really, primarily, I'm in the business of mental health. And really, I think you could put this in any industry. But you got to go back. When you talk about physical health, you could go back to Egyptian times, and you can find medical journals.
00:15:11
Speaker
Right. They were, they were doing some, you know, some crazy stuff, some for benefit of their patients and some not so beneficial, but they were, they were, they had created the medical field even before then you look at mental health.
00:15:28
Speaker
People that had severe mental health, not even severe, sometimes just what I would call middle of the road mental illness sometimes, were still being locked away in the late 60s and early 70s. They were considered unfit to be in society.
00:15:47
Speaker
And so you take the time difference between those two, right? That we've been working on our physical health for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but our mental health as a field really didn't come to fruition until, you know, what are we talking, 50 years ago? So you fast forward 50 years on that, I look to what happened with our physical health.
00:16:13
Speaker
And I think what's going to be 50 years from now is that first off, we're going to have a much greater understanding of how the human brain works. And some of the things that
00:16:25
Speaker
you know, today are causing people pain or struggle. You know, we might, you know, it'd be like when they invented penicillin. You know, people, one day people were dying from infection and the next day they're like, hey, we got something, right? And it eradicates polio, right? Vaccine. I'm not saying that, you know, drugs is the answer to mental health, but we haven't quite had those leaps in mental health yet.
00:16:54
Speaker
where we are able to eradicate an issue, a problem, and I'm talking a little bit more mental illness than everyday mental health, but where they're able to make a huge leap where literally overnight they can remove a huge barrier to someone living their best life.
00:17:17
Speaker
Um, so I think we're going to start seeing some huge advances in the mental health field. I think we're going to see it becoming every day, just like, you know, I tweaked my shoulder in the gym last week. I'm going to physical therapy on Thursday. I freely share that. As soon as it happened, I was like, Oh, you know, I gotta, I gotta, by the second night of sleeping on, I'm like, I gotta go do something about it.
00:17:42
Speaker
told people I work with, told my wife, made the appointment. There was no question of that's not the right thing to do. We don't do that around mental health. We have the stigma and sometimes the shame that comes along with it and the, well, this shouldn't be bothering me. 50 years from now, I hope that we don't even think about seeking out care, that there's just an acceptance of that being who we are.
00:18:12
Speaker
And then finally, that the resources available to us are just there. I don't have to seek. I don't have to wait. I don't have to pay for them. They are there because we consider it a basic human need. Wow. That's exciting in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, I hope. I got fingers crossed as I say these things.
00:18:34
Speaker
Right, exactly. Always the danger of the future in technology taking it in the wrong direction too. So that's a great optimistic outlook. So with these kinds of shifts and even that speculative 50-year shift in mind, what have you been doing to prepare your organization for a change?
Investing in Employee Development
00:18:56
Speaker
Another great question, Dan.
00:18:58
Speaker
A couple of things. So I was an HR, most of my corporate career, 25 years. And while I carried the title of HR, I was really development, employee development, leadership development, organizational development. I handled succession planning and high potentials. And it was really, how do we make sure the organization and its people are prepared for what comes next?
00:19:28
Speaker
And I love that I always had development in my title because that's how we would future-proof the company is if you develop your people, you invest in your people, right? They're gonna be ready or as ready as they can be for the twists and turns and changes that are gonna come. And I believe that same thing in the companies I have today. We take the mental health companies
00:19:57
Speaker
If one of my counselors took advantage of every internal development opportunity that we have, that's over 100 hours of development that we do each year. That's group collaboration, small group collaboration.
00:20:13
Speaker
It's the seminar public seminar that we put on every fall it's the education. First off the first just paying for education and continuing ed as well as reimbursement for those things that sometimes are a little outside of what.
00:20:32
Speaker
would traditionally be paid for, but we invest a lot and that cover that then moves over to my administrative staff. And I feel that when you invest in your employees, when they continually grow and development, you know, nowhere does it said I have to be the guy that's preparing this company. I think if you prepare every employee, now your company is ready.
00:20:57
Speaker
If you invest and say, listen, what's new, what's happening, what's on the horizon, and invest in everyone in your company, that's how you can start the future proof in the organization and make sure that it's not only surviving, but thriving. With that, kind of a sidecar to that thought is, at the same time, I don't want to be first.
00:21:21
Speaker
in things. Let's take virtual counseling, right? The idea of Zoom or Teams, the idea of not actually physically sitting across from a counselor, but doing it via your computer or on your phone. We got a lot of push to do that. If you go back to 2017, 2018, when the technology was starting to be there, to be able to support that.
00:21:51
Speaker
And I got pushed by a couple of companies. One was like our second or third largest customer that we contracted with for mental health benefits. And basically they ultimately left us because we did not have that technology.
00:22:07
Speaker
But we did that on purpose because we didn't feel the technology was ready to handle counseling. First you have HIPAA, the regulations and rules and just the ethics that come around mental health is very different from physical health. It's a much higher level.
00:22:26
Speaker
of confidentiality has to be in place. Part of that is because of the nature of the field. The other part is just for that trust that a client puts in you. They have to feel that it is 100% confidential because of the stigma that comes along around mental health. Technology wasn't there yet. It wasn't being encrypted. It wasn't, you know,
00:22:49
Speaker
Think of Zoom early on in COVID, how many times meetings were getting hacked, you know, where all of a sudden people were showing up. You're especially because they're getting Zoom bumped. Yeah, I mean, they were just getting, you know, someone would type in a random meeting number and get lucky. And all of a sudden they were sitting, imagine if that was your counseling session.
00:23:07
Speaker
There was no guardrails around that. We're based in Wisconsin and unfortunately Wisconsin and laws around virtual counseling still remain very gray. And in fact, if you're to follow the letter of the laws as written, it's not allowed. We're still working under a
00:23:26
Speaker
I can't think of the word right now, but basically an allowance that was put in place during COVID out of necessity, but the basic rules and regulations still haven't been changed to allow virtual counseling. So even though we could have done it, even though the technology technically was there and there was a lot of counseling agencies that were doing it, we said that's
00:23:47
Speaker
That's not the, we're not there yet. And we waited and unfortunately, you know, COVID pushed us there, but it also meant that the technology was ready to go.
00:23:59
Speaker
And so I took that and there's been a couple other points in my career where I realized, you know what? You don't need to be first. You just need to really understand what's happening and then be ready to go when everything lines up the right way. And whether that makes you second, third, or 52nd, that's okay. As long as you're ready when it happens and you know why you're not jumping in quite yet.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, that intentionality there and I talk about this a lot with being in people facing businesses and social impacts organizations and all of that. It's very tough to be in that Silicon Valley mindset and full of moving fast and breaking things because there's actual people on the other side and you have to be really careful about when and how you adopt this new technology and move in those directions. Right.
00:24:53
Speaker
On the learning and development too, I think that's really fascinating. I came from a learning and development background and I've long thought of it as something that should be a separate skill set from that broad human resources umbrella too because it's just so different than
00:25:09
Speaker
the talent acquisition, it's so different than benefits. It's so different from every other element of it. And that seems like it's something that is just so distinct from that that it might even need to be its own field or its own area. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah. In looking at your rising talent in the company, so those high potentials, what are some unusual qualities that you look for? So there's the typical ones of people who work hard and have these kind of degrees and have shown themselves to be proven leaders and that kind of thing. But what are some of the unusual things you look for? Yeah. Well, first off,
00:25:53
Speaker
I don't believe in this generational BS, right? That if you're born between this year and this year, you're all gonna share these common qualities. Everyone is exactly the same from it, yeah.
00:26:04
Speaker
I think that's an excuse to use a big paintbrush to paint a lot of different people in the same color, and I just don't like it. Towards the end of my corporate career, and I was 10, 15 years ago, I used to say, listen, I have terminated, and from an HR perspective, I terminated just as many people over the age of 40 as I did under the age of 40.
00:26:29
Speaker
I think one, there wasn't like one generation didn't have a lock on working hard or ethics or whatever. It's, you know, so I don't believe in that. I like working with younger folks and younger in their careers, right? If you look at my administrative staff across the five companies, a lot of them are a little under the age of 30 or a little over the age of 30.
00:26:57
Speaker
That was not intentional. I didn't sit there and say I'm going to have a millennial driven organization. I just was naturally drawn one to the opportunity to develop because those are the people that are normally hungry to learn.
00:27:15
Speaker
and wanna develop and are welcome to those opportunities when they are done in a respectful manner, not in the, well, let me teach you how the world works, young person, but done in a, hey, okay, let's figure this out. Let's look at how we can, there's a skillset that you're gonna have to work on, so let's figure out how to get you that and do it in a very respectful way. What I love about the people that I work with
00:27:45
Speaker
There is an energy that comes with that. There is an appetite that comes with that. I think there's a better approach to problem solving, not in terms of process, but just the openness to exploring and incorporating new ideas as well as principles that have been around for a while.
00:28:10
Speaker
Uh, so I love, and I love your coaching, Dan, because you're, you're right in the heart of the people that I, I, I really love to work with. Now I do executive coaching and they tend to be, you know, a little, little, um, later in their careers. Uh, I do that because that's where I came from. Um, that's where I'm at. So, uh, some of the experiences they have I've had. So they, there's kind of a shorthand that developed.
00:28:39
Speaker
you go on when it comes to my own companies i just love that energy i love the problem solving now to your question about things that are unusual. It's not an everytime hands down will always happen but i am fond of saying give me someone who's been in the active military give me an nc double athlete from college or give me a farm kid and i'll hire them all day every day.
00:29:04
Speaker
Interesting. And the reason being, I lump those three together because they know how to work hard and they know how to schedule to get stuff done.
00:29:18
Speaker
You know, the NCAA athlete, you know, in college, who's getting up at 4 a.m. to hit the gym, you know, who's traveling on away games during finals weeks, who's, you know, working on their nutrition. There's just, there's a responsibility, I think, in all three of those, farm kids, NCAA athletes and active military. There's a responsibility for them to figure out how they're going to get everything done and working hard.
00:29:48
Speaker
Now, if you were to go through and ask all my employees, what's your background? You're not going to find a lot of them in here. There's a lot of other things that leads to someone getting hired here. But I do love when I find someone that tells me a story or gives me a snapshot into their life.
00:30:10
Speaker
that shows me how they were able to create the opportunity to strive, but then also keep a balance to know that work is not the end all beat all, that there are other things in life that are more important than work. So it's the people that can put that puzzle together and know that they're better for having done that. Those are the people that I love to take a long hard look at.
00:30:40
Speaker
first time I'm thinking of this in full, but there seems to be something of these sort of like talent development, almost like feeder programs that are out there that you can take a look at of whether that's the military, whether that's the college at the 1X, whether that's growing up on a farm. I think for me, I was very cool in college obviously. So I was in Model UN and even that was this like really intensive organization that you were part of. And we were like,
00:31:10
Speaker
running these big conferences and traveling all over the country and competing in debates and that kind of a thing. And it's making me think of how many of these types of things are out there that are doing that work of basically proving and helping people hone their responsibility, their discipline, their balance of interests and passions and work and all of that out there. That's a really interesting one, Steve.
00:31:34
Speaker
I mean, it's a very cliche question, but I love asking people, you know, okay, so what do you do for fun? What do you do to, you know, to balance your life out? And there's the people that really have thought about that and do it intentionally. And then there's the people that, you know, are still they haven't quite figured that out yet.
00:31:56
Speaker
But I love that question because that's when you get to see the real person you know when they all of a sudden their eyes light up because they're talking about something that Really holds a special place in their heart that they do Not because they're paid or because it's gonna pay off dividends professionally, but they're doing it just for the love of doing it and when you find that then Conversation gets really interesting
00:32:22
Speaker
That's so fascinating. Except for the longevity of keeping them engaged in the organization because they have other things that drive them and then also bringing that energy and that passion and side benefits to the work itself. Yeah. And listen, I don't hire anyone anymore thinking that they're going to work for me for 30 years. A lot of how we structure things, counseling and take counselors.
00:32:47
Speaker
Counselors normally, if they stay three years, then they'll stay five to seven, but they normally max out at seven years. I call it ghosts in the walls, that the counselors, just because of the intensity and the stories and all of that, that either at the three-year mark or the five to seven-year mark, they need a change of scenery.
00:33:12
Speaker
They need to go and oftentimes because we deal, we're traditionally known as an employee assistance program or an EAP. That's short-term mental health counseling. A lot of times they want to go get into group therapy or they want to go work at a behavioral health center where they're getting more into mental illness and inpatient care versus our outpatient.
00:33:36
Speaker
you know, I have no, I have no false beliefs that I'm going to hire someone, they're going to stay forever. So it's much more into that. How can we align our wants and our needs over this period of time so that we both walk away feeling really good if it ends at some point? Yeah, it sounds like that, that partnership and the respect to your earlier point is there and has to come from both sides. And it's not just, you know,
00:34:05
Speaker
your company is going to do everything that everyone who works for them wants all the time. There's still that trade-off there. They have to also show up and perform and be great at their roles, but there is that mutual respect and understanding there. I think I shared this with you before, Dan. I mean, listen, I'm not the greatest place to work. I'm a pretty decent place if you align to what we're doing and how we're doing it.
00:34:36
Speaker
And hopefully this doesn't come across as bragging or egotistical, but in the height of the great recession, for two years, we had zero voluntary turnover. During when everyone seemed to be changing companies and looking elsewhere, we went two years without anyone saying, I don't want to work here anymore.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, we kept the whole team. Now we had a couple of retirements and some other things happened, but no one, no one tendered a resignation for over two years. Um, and to me that that's, I think speaks to the culture, but also our hiring process of making sure that we're understanding what is that, but who is this person or what did they want? And are we able to provide that for them? Yeah. And having that.
00:35:27
Speaker
upfront as opposed to either desperately trying to hang on to people or just having people who are misaligned throughout. That seems like that's really important for you. What's a really thought-provoking either leadership or management or business idea that you've come across recently,
Remote Work and Office Return Debate
00:35:46
Speaker
Stu? I'm going to go with one that on its surface is not thought-provoking. It's this whole idea of work from home right now.
00:35:57
Speaker
Cause I'm fascinated by it. Cause I think so many companies are getting it wrong right now. So here, I'm gonna give you a Steve Bowie view of the world. You know, you think about work, right? So it took us what, 120 years, 150 years to develop work as we knew it back. Let's go prior to COVID.
00:36:24
Speaker
You know, it was well over a hundred years of evolution to get to the workplace as we knew it. And that workplace was designed by companies. The first thing it was, it's a workplace. It's a place, right? You went to work. Where are you going? I got to get to work, right? So it was removed from everything else in your life. It was a place that you went to.
00:36:49
Speaker
Second thing was there was a time set to it. You have to be there by 7.30 and you're gonna work until 4.30. So now here's the place, but here's the time that you have to be in this place. And then so what is this place designed for? It's for work. You're gonna show up at this time to this place and you're gonna do work. Why was it designed that way? Because it made leading people there easier.
00:37:18
Speaker
I could be at that place during their hours and everyone that I was responsible for or everyone that was doing a job for my company or whatever would be there and I could see them. You're all in one place, you're all there at one time. I could go around and watch each of you work. And that made my job as a leader really easy.
00:37:45
Speaker
Right? So 100 years to evolve to that point. COVID hits, work from home happens, blows the whole thing up. Right? Now it's not a place. Work is actually happening in the home. Those used to be two separate places. Now they're one place. Work was happening outside normal working hours. I use the air quotes.
00:38:07
Speaker
People were able to do it as it fit into their calendars. And surprisingly, people liked it. They thought, hey, this isn't bad. Not everybody loved it. And let's face it, COVID did a real number on our mental health. It rocket fired us into a mental health crisis that we're still dealing with today.
00:38:27
Speaker
but it opened up the parameters of what work could be. So now, that was gonna be okay, there's the new norm, but now we have it swinging way back the other way where companies like Walt Disney and Zoom and these others saying, nope, you gotta show up, you gotta be here. And they're putting a lot of terminology on why they think it's important. It's creativity and it's team building and it's blah, blah, blah.
00:38:55
Speaker
What's funny about it is that companies that are so diligent about data really don't have any of the support, that idea that you need it for creativity or team building or productivity. In fact, in some cases it's flying in the face of it.
00:39:14
Speaker
So what that leads me to believe is why there's such a push for getting people back in the workplace, because then it goes back to that old model of leadership that makes it easy. They're in a place, they're there at a time, and I don't have to figure out how to lead differently. I can lead like I would have always been leading. So when we talk about that idea of thought-provoking leadership,
00:39:38
Speaker
All my employees have the option to work from home. With counselors, if it's an in-person session, it has to be in one of our clinics. But if it's virtual, we have it set up where they can do virtual sessions from home. And if they wanted to, they could set up where they do all virtual appointments on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they do it from home.
00:40:05
Speaker
What we have found though is that with a lot of our counselors, they intermingle those virtual sessions, because they like having the place to go to. They like, you know that this sets in their day a certain way.
00:40:22
Speaker
They know they have that flexibility there. Administratively, I work from home two days out of the week. I'm in the office three days. I work from home two days a week. I get stuff done, but it's not between the hours of eight and five. I was working last night. I didn't work on Friday. I didn't do anything related to any of the companies on Fridays. Last night I logged in around four o'clock. I worked till seven.
00:40:46
Speaker
And my administrative team has that same ability. I have not seen a drop-off in productivity. I haven't seen a drop-off in our team working as teams. I haven't seen a drop-off in our ability to take care of our clients. What I have seen now is that I and my leadership team have grown in terms of how do you lead when the person is not sitting right in front of you.
00:41:15
Speaker
that is, yeah, it's just such a shift from leadership being a position that is for the leader's benefit of, you know, I've become a leader and I've achieved leadership and now I'm going to reap the rewards of being a leader. And it's toward that, you know, how do we bring people together in this organization and work toward our common objectives here? And I think that's, it's such a difference of like, is this to make the leader's job easier? Is this to
00:41:44
Speaker
have optics of looking productive versus to actually be productive and thinking about that. And I think there's certain companies and organizations that have a physical plant or something where it's like you need to be there in person and it makes sense for the Disney example even for maybe park leadership has to be on site and that makes total sense. You have like an operation that's running
00:42:09
Speaker
But for a lot of companies where they're just doing straight up knowledge work or innovative work, it doesn't make a ton of sense. You're totally right, it's not backed by the data. It's a real shift of what is leadership about? What is management about? Is it about me or is it about actually doing a good job? I think the companies that are really going to thrive and be a true attractor of talent are the ones that are, to your point,
00:42:38
Speaker
when there is the ability to be flexible, they are flexible. It's refreshing to actually
00:42:45
Speaker
you know, hear a thoughtful approach to this too, because I feel like there's so many ideological caps on it where it's just like, everyone needs to always be remote all the time. Everyone needs to be fully in person or else you're not really working. We need to check on you. And yeah, it's nuanced and it's something that's a conversation and a dialogue and where, you know, you're going to lose people if you go in a certain direction and you have to take that all into account as a business owner, as a leader,
00:43:14
Speaker
What am I willing to do in terms of trade-offs here? What's a leadership book or other management resource that you find yourself coming back to the most often?
Entrepreneurship Book Recommendations
00:43:30
Speaker
I'm a big reader. So I read 24 to 30 books a year.
00:43:38
Speaker
And they're split between fiction and nonfiction. I like murdery thriller books. It's important to not just be on the business stuff. Yeah, so I have some interesting escapism. We have a murdery book club.
00:43:55
Speaker
here in the office where we trade books around those. And then the other half are nonfiction and I read them, a lot of them are business books. And the two, so I'm a book guy. The two that I always, I don't go back physically, but I think a lot about. The first one is called The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.
00:44:22
Speaker
And it's written by a gentleman, Mike Michalowicz, I think is how you say it. There's just a lot of vowels and consonants in his last name. He's written a whole bunch of books. He's a Gen Xer. So I get all his movie references in his books. I know you're a big movie guy too. Yeah. And he swears and whatever. But his toilet paper entrepreneur was his first book. And I read it shortly after I bought my first company.
00:44:51
Speaker
and left corporate and it was really about how do you start a company and what's the mindset you have to have and how do you do some really basic things like how do you go get customers and how do you decide if you should hire an employee or not. And what I loved about it and why the book is called The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is he says, listen, if you go into the bathroom, right, and you sit down and you look and there's only two sheets of toilet paper left,
00:45:19
Speaker
He said, in that moment, you become an efficiency expert when it comes to toilet paper. You become the world's greatest problem solver as you look around the bathroom and try to figure out what your options are. If it might require more than two sheets of toilet paper, right? So his whole thing about it is, you know,
00:45:44
Speaker
When you sit down and there's a full roll of toilet paper, you're like, hey, you're blowing your nose, and you're wiping your shoes, and you're doing it right, and you're taking 30 sheets at a time. But entrepreneurs, you have to keep that problem-solving efficiency, because it's so easy to fall, and you make some money, and then all of a sudden you're like, I should have an office. I should have a nice desk. I should have employees.
00:46:12
Speaker
I'm not cheap, but I do carry that bottle on of saying, well, if I had no money, if I had no assets to leverage, how would I do this? And then I work from that point. And I think if you're going to own a business, that idea of how do you, what's the most efficient way? What's the quote unquote cheapest way I could do this?
00:46:40
Speaker
and then work from that point to decide what you're gonna do. You get a couple of clients in and you got some cash and all of a sudden you might make some commitments that all of a sudden things get lean, aren't gonna be helping you anymore. So that's one that I keep going back to philosophically. The other one is the classic of Simon Senex, start with why.
00:47:05
Speaker
And again, you know, to the folks that you're working with and a lot of my, especially my administrative staff, you know, boomers, Gen Xers, again, to use those age generational tags, you know, we were just told to do it. Um, and then that's how we emulated our leadership was just, well, I'm the boss. So you do it. Cause I, if you want to pay check, you know, you're going to do it. But when you, when you approach something with why.
00:47:36
Speaker
And again, it's why I love each, you know, as each wave of college graduates come in, they're asking that question, you know, it's rising from the 10th question to the fifth question to now oftentimes the first question, why are we doing this? Why is this important? And as a leader, I think the more you start with that why, where you consider the why, the more that you get the best out of someone.
00:48:03
Speaker
I used to teach a leadership class and now I do some keynote.
00:48:09
Speaker
speeches around leadership, sometimes how it intersects with mental health. But I have an exercise that I love to do. I have someone come up from the audience and, you know, in the Midwest, we have Culver's, right? It's, you know, burgers and fries and frozen custard. I always, I have a gift card, $5 gift card to Culver's and I asked for a volunteer. I say, hey, come up here. I'm not going to embarrass you, right?
00:48:35
Speaker
But come up here and if you just help me with this, I'll give you a gift card to callers. And I have them stand against the wall and I tell them, I give them a post-it note. And I say, I just want you to reach up, keep your feet flat on the floor. I want you to reach up as high as you can with your right arm and put that post-it note up as high as you can. No strings, no tricks, whatever. They go ahead and do it. I give them a $5 gift card. And I said, now listen, here's the deal. I can give, I'm gonna give you another one.
00:49:04
Speaker
if you do that again. And normally they're like, sure. I said, okay, but I want to tell you something first. Not only am I going to give you a $5 gift card, here's the deal. I need you to put that post-it note two inches higher than the first one.
00:49:20
Speaker
And if you do that, not only are you going to get a $5 gift card, everyone sitting around you is going to get a $5 gift card, the Culver's. In fact, I want you to think of those people not as, you know, random people sitting next to you or, you know, coworkers who came to this conference with you. I want you to think of them as your family.
00:49:40
Speaker
And this isn't just a $5 gift card. This is food, man. This is love, right? This is burger fries and frozen custard. I mean, there's nothing better. And if you can just put this post-it note two inches higher, everyone's going to feel that love from you. I have never in the 10 years I've been doing that exercise. I have never had anyone not be able to put that post-it note two inches higher.
00:50:06
Speaker
And the reason I love doing that exercise is because I explain to people that two inches is discretionary effort. We all, we work every day, every time we have a task to do, we figure out what is an acceptable level to do it at. What does good look like that other people would say, yeah, that's good. But we always leave a little in the tank. That's never a hundred percent all out.
00:50:33
Speaker
We say that for when something's really important, when we understand the benefits that it will bring. And that's why I love Simon Sinek's Start With Why. Because the different, how people get that two inches more is because I explained what will happen and why it's important. And so I use that thought a lot.
00:50:58
Speaker
When I'm introducing something, I'm going to explain something. I'm going to ask someone to do something. I need to explain that why to them, because when they understand that, they're going to give you more than if you just say, do it.
00:51:14
Speaker
Right. And even being restrained with how often you do that as a leader, I think is key of figuring out what things are actually important to move the needle on what we're trying to do. Why are we trying to do that? And then people will stretch, but when you just use it as super transactional, people get burned out really quick. Absolutely. But it's
00:51:39
Speaker
You know, to sit there and go listen, if you do this, here's the downstream, upstream implications. Here's what, you know, our purpose, all of our, the five companies my wife and I own, they all share the same purpose. It's we care, we help. That's why they exist is because we want to work with people that genuinely care about others and they want to help them. And it's amazing how those four words
00:52:09
Speaker
When we talk about what does that actually look like? What is the impact that we have? And we share that information. Later today, you know, leadership team, we have my monthly meeting. That's the third Monday of the month. We go through all the numbers and we go through all the data points that tell us how the impact that we're having. And then I do a skinny version. I record it and I send it out to all employees.
00:52:34
Speaker
And we talk about the surveys and we talk about times to appointment and we talk about where the bonus pool is at. Tell them, here's our revenue for the month. Here's our expense for the month.
00:52:45
Speaker
I'm explaining so that when I say, hey, listen, we lost this customer and here's an action we have to take, they already know that we have to take that action because they already understand the why behind that customer and their impact that they have for us and what we're able to do because of it.
00:53:06
Speaker
It's so much of a connection to a lot of these other leadership concepts to ownership and enterprise mindset and everything of helping people understand the purpose behind what they're doing for the business. I just love that.
00:53:21
Speaker
Outside of business, I know you mentioned the, uh, the, uh, the murder books club, um, maybe let's not make that the headline. Exactly right. Yeah. It's going to be the podcast title leadership inspiration. I lead a, I read a lot of books about serial killers. Uh, you bowie on murder. Where else do you draw inspiration as a leader?
Self-care Practices for Leaders
00:53:45
Speaker
You know, I'm a big, it took me.
00:53:50
Speaker
It took me till probably four or five years ago to understand how important my self care was to everything I was doing.
00:54:04
Speaker
And so the things that I do, where am I drawing inspiration from? I share it freely. I stopped drinking almost four years ago. I live in Wisconsin. I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's the drunkest city in the drunkest state. It is the epicenter. Right. So that's to stop drinking in this place is something, but I didn't like the role it was playing. I didn't like the time it was taking, uh, for my life. I wasn't getting better at it. And.
00:54:34
Speaker
That right there made a huge difference. So I got after that, and then a guy owned two counseling companies. I didn't see a counselor regular, and now I do, once a month I have a counselor. And I tell her that part of her job is just to let me data dump everything in my head so I don't overwhelm people, and I also don't keep it bottled up. And we've worked through some stuff that was hidden in the closet that I wasn't aware of.
00:55:03
Speaker
I went last year, last fall, I went on a meditation retreat. I'd never meditated, never done yoga, and it was five days on a mountaintop in North Carolina, and I learned meditation, I learned basic yoga, and we did silence. We were in silence for two and a half days. No books, no music, no reading. We did meditation, we went for walks. That, holy cow, was that a game changer.
00:55:31
Speaker
in terms of my stress level and having a tool to stress. Two years ago, I started working out with a trainer a couple of times a week and last year I changed my diet.
00:55:44
Speaker
Now, I'm starting to develop hobbies. I love woodworking, and I took a great class in July up in northern Minnesota, Otomata, which is little wooden mechanical devices. They're just whimsical little gears and things that you make out of wood, and their only purpose is to bring a smile to your face. I learned to do that, and next month I'm going back up to learn figure carving.
00:56:12
Speaker
It's a hobby that has absolutely nothing to do with business, absolutely nothing to do with numbers or it's all creativity. All of those things that I just described have paid off incredibly well in terms of being a leader and being a business person. It's brought me perspective, it's brought me a level of calm,
00:56:41
Speaker
It's brought me energy. It's brought me the ability to unplug. It fills little buckets of joy that I didn't realize those buckets existed for me. All of those things, that mind, body, spirit, fill in your heart, all of that I now bring to work with me as a leader. And man, I can feel the difference.
00:57:11
Speaker
Well, thanks for sharing all that. It's an inspiration to me and I'm sure to a lot of people listening too of that self-care being so important to your role as a leader. Steve, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure and I've learned a lot and I think a lot of people will have a lot of takeaways from this. Where can listeners learn more about what you're up to and get in touch if they'd like to?
Resources and Services
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm gonna give two websites. One is bowymg.com. B-A-U-E-M-G.com. It's short for Bowie Management Group. That is all our companies. Has our links to the five companies. Also gives a little background on how my wife and I ended up at this point.
00:57:55
Speaker
The one, if you want to get into specifically the coaching and keynotes, that's SteveBowie.com, S-T-E-V-E-B-A-U-E.com. That takes you directly to the coaching and keynote website. You can also get through the first website as well.
00:58:14
Speaker
Thanks so much. I'd really encourage people to check Steve out. He's really a wealth of knowledge and a great resource on this and just working in a ton of these different spaces. So really encourage you to check him out. Listeners, thanks for joining us today. If you got something out of the show, if you could please share it with a colleague or leave a quick review on the podcast app you're using, it'll really help spread the word so others can find us. And Steve, I wanted to thank you again for joining me. I really appreciate it.
00:58:41
Speaker
Oh, Dan, listen, you know, I think the world of you, you're doing great stuff, man. Thank you so much.