Preface
When I was a young kid, my Mom sent me outside to help Dad and take him a plastic cup of ice water. It was a hot, humid, Midwestern summer day. When I got outside, I saw Dad was sweaty and dirty from working in the yard. He had the push mower flipped upside down and he was taking apart the pieces surrounding the blades, underneath the mower’s cutting deck.
When he saw me, Dad smiled, stopped what he was doing and took a long drink from the cup I had bought him. Out of nowhere he started telling me a story about when he was a young kid my age. Dad grew up on a family farm in Iowa, just outside of the small town of Kanawha (population 700).
“It was Fall. My Dad had been in the field combining corn all day. He worked around the seasons and the weather. He worked in support of neighbors, and especially during harvest, he often worked late into the evening. It was already dark outside and Dad had pulled the combine into the machine shed (an open wood framed building covered in thin steel siding with large sliding doors at both ends). The machine shed was cold and had a dirt floor.
“After dinner, Mom sent my twin brother and I outside to “help” our Dad in the machine shed. When we entered, he was under the combine, laying in the dirt, with wrenches scattered around his upper body. I think he may have been replacing the cutter bar. There were nuts, bolts and washers on the chest of my Dad’s overalls. I went to the right side of the combine, while my twin brother Bob went to the left side of the machine. We sat quietly in the dirt next to Dad and were watching him work.
“As Dad moved down the length of the combine cutting bar, one of the wrenches became just out of his reach. The wrench was directly in front of my twin brother.”
Dad took a pause from the story and stretched out his arm into the air. I can still see him making a motion with his hand like he was reaching for something.
“I remember seeing my Dad’s hand straining, struggling for that wrench that was just out of reach. I can still see his fingers scraping in the dirt like it was yesterday. I looked at my twin brother, and he was looking at our Dad’s fingers too. The look on my twin brother’s face was one of anticipation, as if he was wondering whether Dad would be able to reach the wrench. He made no effort to help. He just watched.
“Then I looked toward my Dad’s face and saw disappointment. Not anger. Not sadness, but disappointment. I had never seen my Dad look like that before. When I saw that look, I climbed over him and grabbed the wrench from the dirt. I put it in his hand. He finished tightening the cutting bar and sent us back into the house.”
“I remember nothing else from that day, but I have never forgotten this. When you see someone that needs your help, you help them… without them having to ask.”
My Dad told stories like this often. I didn’t realize it at the time, but through his stories, my Dad was teaching me the secret to successful leadership. He had great accomplishments in work and our community, but the intentional focus of his life was on something more intangible. Growing up, I sensed if you wanted to be a leader, there was something important hidden behind being able to get something done.
I heard echoes of my Dad’s lessons during my time in the United States Marines Corps. Then again, as I began leading my first business of 90 employees at the age of 34. One day a supervisor helped me finally put together the pieces of what my Dad was trying to teach me about leadership.
In the wake of that event, I realized my Dad was trying to teach me that within every relationship in your life, it’s not just what you accomplish together, but HOW you do it.
When you lead without the HOW, the most important part of leadership is missing. Both you and the people surrounding you will be unfulfilled, regardless of how much you win.
Today, The HOW Is What’s Missing
In a society that is more prosperous and educated than ever before, do you sense the growing dissatisfaction in our workplaces, our culture, our schools, our communities, our places of worship and in our government? The turnover, the apathy and the frustration are all symptoms of the same underlying issue. Leaders are spending more money to make people happy and it only continues to make things worse.
Consider this, what if my Dad was right and what’s missing on your team can’t be bought? What if the solution is free and readily available to any leader who was willing to stop listening to the experts and look to something more intangible?
I believe that what’s missing on your team is the HOW part of your leadership. The priorities, goals, KPI’s, data and information, have made you busier than ever, causing you to unintentionally neglect the HOW.
Threads Is The HOW
The solution for bringing the HOW back into your leadership and healing your team is Threads. Threads is a method of core values leadership that intentionally injects the HOW into every part of the way your team interacts, by ensuring core values are always on an equal footing with what you accomplish.
As a Threads leader, you make a commitment to success always requiring both things… what you accomplish and HOW you do it. You promise your team that you will never sacrifice the HOW in pursuit of your goals and that you will hold everyone on the team accountable to this same standard.
As you begin to lead with Threads, the symptoms you used to spend your time treating will start to clear up… rapidly. It is possible for an organization with hundreds of employees to have less than 2% employee turnover and produce financial results in the 99th percentile for their industry, through a consistent commitment to leading with Threads. Your HR team or other managers may tell you this is impossible in today’s environment, but I assure you, I’ve done it before and seen this happen many other places.
In The End, The HOW is What Matters
My final lesson from my Dad in core values leadership came after he died in 2016 as I welcomed people to his visitation.
As the oldest son, I was standing next to my mom, my wife and our children. My brother and his family stood next to us. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the doors to the funeral home opened. The visitation was scheduled from 4-7pm. People came through for nearly 5 hours straight.
Individuals from all walks of life. Calloused hands. Work boots. Suits and ties. Farmers. Doctors. Business owners. Bankers. The waitresses and cooks from his favorite breakfast hang out. Wounded veterans he had made canes for. Seniors and staff from the care center he volunteered at.
After 73 years of life, hundreds of people showed up to pay their respects to my Dad. Not one single person would speak to me about his accomplishments in business or the community, which were many. Instead, people told me stories. Stories like the ones my Dad told me growing up.
One of his former employees drove 350 miles to the visitation with his wife.
“I worked for your Dad back in the day. I was going through a rough patch. He talked to my wife and I about my problem with alcohol. Your Dad arranged treatment and time off work for me to get better. It saved our marriage.”
I stood there in the visitation line listening to stories like this. Over and over for 5 hours. Let me tell you, it was a hell of a time to finally truly understand what one leader like my Dad meant to the rest of the world. I knew people loved him, but I found out why that night.
If I’m being completely honest, one of the primary reasons why I’m taking the time to write Threads down is because I want my Dad’s life lessons to live on through a new generation of leaders.
Start the Journey
The rest of this book will share the actual stories, exercises, templates and financial models I used to be a core values leader for my team. I’ll walk you through to process of leading with Threads in an understandable, step-by-step way… from laying the foundation, to implementation and then the ongoing maintenance of holding people accountable.
Our society is starving for leaders who will make the HOW a non-negotiable part of their success. If you are a skilled Threads leader, you will be able to write your own ticket to wherever you want to go in life.
Along the way, you will also experience the satisfaction of having people on your team tell you that they can’t imagine having to go to work anywhere else.
I want you to feel this as a leader and I want the people on your team to experience what it is like to work in this kind of environment.
