Please note : This transcript is automatically generated and provided for your convenience.

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Robert Heath Senior: What you really have to do is learn how to thrive in that chaos.



If we could just look at it a little bit differently, if we could see the problem a little bit differently, we could come to solutions that actually worked for everybody.


Rob D. Willis: Welcome to superpowered with me, Rob d Willis. Each week I talk to leaders about their superpowers, how they got them, and how you can get them too. If you're new, here, you are awesome. Please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We've got amazing guests coming on every single week, and today I am talking to Robert Heath Senior about fixing what matters.

With military precision, Robert brings a really unique perspective to leadership and problem solving. Having transitioned from commanding Marines to building successful consulting practice, his experience as a Marine Corps officer combined with his work saving millions for Fortune 500 companies has given him some [00:01:00] really powerful insights into how leaders can identify and fix what truly matters in their organizations.

Welcome to the show.

Robert Heath Senior: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Rob D. Willis: Could you just tell us a bit in your own words about who you are and what you do?

Robert Heath Senior: Yeah, so I think the easiest way to say it is I am someone who helps leaders to get the best out of themselves and those that they lead. And I come to this journey as someone who has always really wanted to, to to be the best that I could be, and struggled a lot with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and know what that. Feeling is to kind of feel like you're constantly on the hamster wheel, not sure if you're doing what you need to be doing, and then you're, you're professional enough to get put into a leadership position and then the stress just intensifies tenfold because you know, and you hope that nobody else knows that you're really not qualified to be in charge of these people.

'cause you don't know how to get. Other [00:02:00] people to do their best. You're just really good at doing your best and fixing yourself, and so I help leaders to understand that that's the norm. As a matter of fact, there's a principle called the Peter Principle, which says that we generally get promoted to our highest level of incompetence, and that's then how we learn.

And so really helping leaders to get comfortable where they are. Then to figure out how they can get the best out of themselves, how they can master their time, and how they can be the type of leader that gets the best out of anybody that they lead, regardless of who they get and put in front of them.

Rob D. Willis: And of course a big part of being a leader is identifying and solving problems. And that's really where I want to to focus our conversation today. And I'm wondering, looking back on your experience as a Marine,

Robert Heath Senior: Mm-hmm.

Rob D. Willis: what did that teach you about identifying and fixing what really matters?

Robert Heath Senior: Yeah. Yeah. One of the interesting things about going to the Marine Corps for me, so I came to the Marine Corps after a career being a teacher. So I got out of undergrad [00:03:00] and if we go a little bit further back, I'm originally from the south side of Chicago, and if you, any of you all have heard any of the things about Chicago, I. Outside of just kind of visiting and everything, you know, there's, there's, there's interesting, you know, crime statistics and, and interesting poverty statistics and things that happen in the city. And I was one of those people, I always say I grew up a little bit, we grew up hood adjacent, is what I like to call it.

My parents made sure I went to good schools. We lived in, in pretty decent areas, but then I also had family and friends and our church family and, and things of that nature that were in the middle of, you know, waring gang neighborhoods and all the, all the like. And so I got to see, kind of, as Charles Dickens said, a tale of two cities, if you would.

Right. And that drew me to education and wanting to, to, to help and to change things. What I saw when I went as a, as a teacher, was that there were so many other factors that I didn't know were impacting the problems that I wanted to change, and I knew I needed to learn. A couple of things. Number one, I need to learn how to understand the system and the levers of [00:04:00] power and to problem solve better. And in number two, I knew I needed to learn how to lead people better. And that's what really took me to the Marine Corps. It also took me to law school where I learned and understood how our system of laws works and how our structures of power work in the US at least. And so. Going to the Marine Corps was one of those things that just was, I mean, eye opening and paradigm shifting for me.

And one of the first things that we learned when I was in the Marine Corps was. How leadership actually works. And there's a book that we first read when we when becoming Marine corps officers called war Fighting. And in that book it talks about the fact that the fog of war ever present and that anyone who is trying to, you know, manage or organize the chaos of war is on a fool's errand. What you really have to do is learn how to thrive in that chaos. And when you can learn how to thrive in that chaos, then you can actually. Make things happen when you're not trying to change the external factors. [00:05:00] And one of those things is understanding the 70% solution, understanding that you don't have to have everything a hundred percent right.

You don't have to have all the information, you don't have to know everything. To do something. And that was one of the biggest breakthroughs in problem solving that I got because I was one of those kind of analysis people. Fact finders, if you've ever done the K assessment, I'm a high fact finder on the Kobe, I'm an eight on a scale of 10.

Right. And it freed me and it taught me a lot about what are the prudent ways, what are the, the, the respectable ways? What are the actually. ways, best practice ways where you can get things done without having to have all of the information.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm. I'd love to hear about one of those moments where there was chaos around you in the Marines

Robert Heath Senior: Mm-hmm.

Rob D. Willis: you had to do something,

Robert Heath Senior: Mm-hmm.

Rob D. Willis: even if it wasn't gonna solve everything in one go.

Robert Heath Senior: Yeah. There, there, there are a number of, of, of different stories. I think one of the [00:06:00] things that happened, I. My first couple of years in the Marine Corps, I was a, I was a defense counsel, so I was a defense attorney defending marines and sailors who had been accused of wrongdoing. something that was really interesting was, you know, when you first start off, you are in this space and you're, you're, you're the champion for the little guy, right? You're holding the system back against people who are wrongfully accused and, and all the like, and over that period, over the two years that I was in that role. One of the things that I got to see was that, yes, there were some systemic issues, there were some problems, but one of the most interesting things that I was able to see was that those systemic issues, those problems were not because there were bad people in place. Now, every once in a while you had a bad person, but by and large, there weren't bad people in place, but there were systems that didn't account for certain things.

So I got basically, by the time I was done, I had about a 70% acquittal rate of the cases that I took to trial, and I would. While that normally would make somebody feel, you know, [00:07:00] amazing about it, what it it did for me was it was this, this kind of hollow feeling because the people that I got acquitted, I could not get them back.

The time that they were the accused I could not get them back. The time that they were looked upon as if they didn't have honor, as if they weren't courageous, is that they weren't committed, which are our values in the Marine Corps. I could never fix that, what I realized was. I alone as a defense counsel couldn't fix the system. But there were things that I could do to impact the system. And so one of the things that I did, and there were two cases that I had where I had clients who hadn't committed a crime, right? But they were accused of crimes. And in the one hand there was a, a kid, he was a great Marine, I. And it was believed that he had done something that he was, that he, that, that, that was illegal, but he hadn't done it.

Then I had another kid that wasn't a great Marine. He should have been out of the Marine Corps, but the thing that they were accusing him of he didn't do. Right. Both cases, they're innocent, but they're two different outcomes that we [00:08:00] need. And what I was able to do was to go to the commanders and have a conversation with them that. Explained how to get to success without having to go through the normal channels. The normal scenarios, normal situations that that were there. So one of the situations, I went to the commander and explained to him that this kid hasn't done anything wrong and he's a good kid. If he gets punished improperly, it's gonna ruin good order and discipline in your unit.

'cause this is one of the first cases, this is a new commander who had just taken over the unit. It's one of the first cases in your unit. Now, if we can fix this differently, if we can. Change this narrative. 'cause he did do something that that people can learn from. And what we actually wound up doing is getting the kid in front of the unit and explaining what he did that was wrong, explaining how he made a mistake.

And basically what it was is he had taken some medicine from his. Roommate that was pain medication. It was just prescription pain medication and therefore it was a narcotic, and that's illegal, right? But he [00:09:00] didn't know that it was a narcotic, nor did his roommate know that it was a narcotic. As a matter of fact, his roommate said, I've never given a narcotic to anyone.

The only thing that I did is I gave him ibuprofen and Tylenol with codeine. Right.

Rob D. Willis: Oh.

Robert Heath Senior: you, you could, you could tell in his, in his sworn statement to the police that he didn't know what the, the Tylenol Co code was a, was a narcotic, right? So nobody had done anything wrong, even though they had done something wrong. And so in that case, we got the kid in front of command and he was able to. Teach and train everybody. And the command was able to show that they were maintaining good order and discipline, but they were also taking care of their Marines. 'cause this was a kid that was beloved by all of his company commanders, all of his platoon commanders. He a good kid. As a matter of fact, this was a kid who while he was in trouble for this thing. Had went and got drunk, went to a movie and had to relieve himself outside, which is one of the things that we do all the time when we're in the field. But it's not so good in civilian land, right? And so he got stopped by a [00:10:00] cop and basically got a ticket for indecent exposure. Even knowing that this could negatively impact his ability to stay in the Marine Corps, he was willing to take the punishment for doing that 'cause. and I quote, he says, sir, I did this. I have to take ownership for this. I didn't do that other thing. That's why I'm fighting it. But I did this, I'm gonna go ahead and, and, and, and pay the piper. That was the quality of the kid that we were dealing with.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Robert Heath Senior: that's kind of one story. was able to get the unit to do the thing that it needed to do.

I was able to help the commander 'cause he felt like his hands were tied because he felt like he had to handle it in a certain way, but we were actually able to help him get a different way. The second kid. Was a different, was a different story altogether. Like I said, he was not a Marine that anybody would want to stay a Marine.

When I met him as my client, he was in the break in, in, in jail. Right. He had already been busted down in rank from Lance Corporal to private, which is two ranks down, and he didn't wanna stay in the [00:11:00] Marine Corps. The Marine Corps didn't want him anymore. He just didn't know how to get out. However, he was accused also of. Illegally using drugs when in reality he had a prescription for the drugs that he was using. The, the two systems, the civilian system and the, the naval system just weren't talking to each other. Right. And so the, they didn't know that he had actually had a prescription for this. 'cause he got it when he went home and had gotten hurt.

And then while he was at home, he went to the hospital, had a prescription, all the rest of it. So we get all the way back to the end of this, this case, and again. I know the system. The system, the way that it works is we're gonna be in trial for another six months. I'm gonna win this trial, then he's gonna come back to the unit and he's gonna have beat the system. A guy who is a cancer for the unit, nobody. Right? And he even recognized that, I don't wanna be a Marine anymore. I don't wanna do any of this. I wanna get out. So what we were able to do was to work with the command to. get him fired from the Marine Corps, which he was comfortable with. He was, he was like, send me home, please.

[00:12:00] That's the best scenario for me. So getting fired was not a problem for him. He just had to fight. Being called a criminal. When he wasn't a criminal, he was a bad worker. He wasn't a criminal that was right. So long story, less long, I was able to fix the system because I was able to look at. Alternative route, alternative ways of solving the problem rather than the way that we all felt like our hands were tied. Right. And there were so many di different instances where existed during the time that I was in the Marine Corps and I got to see it and I've got to hear, you know, other stories and, and see different things even from people who had been. Before were deployed, been been at war, there were a number of times where if we could just look at it a little bit differently, if we could see the problem a little bit differently, we could come to solutions that actually worked for everybody.

And that was one of the major things that I took away from my time in the Marine Corps is actually what made me go and put my hand in the air to be a company commander there later. And the command, a company of [00:13:00] Marines.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah. Yeah. Taking a different perspective, but also you are reminding me of. One of the classics classic books, seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and that distinction of the circle of concern and the circle of influence,

Robert Heath Senior: A,

Rob D. Willis: something that you can do being proactive.

Robert Heath Senior: Exactly.

Rob D. Willis: I'd love to now think about how you are taking these lessons and applying them in businesses. So let's say you are working as a fractional COO, or you're just as a consultant helping a business identify where. Can be cut or there are problems. Have you got a general high level process that you'd like to take them through?

Robert Heath Senior: One of the things that is most important to me. When I go into an organization is to really look at how are they communicating, right? Communication. So many people get stuck in the communication trap where what we like to call is the intention trap, [00:14:00] where they're focused on their intention so much that they're not paying attention to how their results to what their results are, right?

So bosses will come through and they will say, you know, well, we told you what you needed to get done. As if people what they need to get done is all that is necessary to make sure that it gets done. And when they're faced with the fact that I told you what needs to get done, but it didn't get done immediately, I blame you.

But there's the problem that they don't understand is that with communication, there's two parts. There's the transmitter, but then there's also the receiver and. One of the things that we learned in the Marine Corps, when you're doing comms, you always have to have a reception code. So if you're, if you're talking, there's, there's a way that you convey to the other person that you have received, right? different, different codes. So you can say copy or a lot of times if you're asking something, so if I say right, I need you to go three steps down and four steps to the right, how copy, right. [00:15:00] asking how copy to make sure that you understand what it is that I said, and then I would get back a copy of Roger.

Right. Heard any of those types of responses. And then when it's done, you, you, you listen for and over and out, which lets them, right, which lets us know communicating. There are certain. Protocols that are necessary to know that you have done the communication that you're supposed to supposed to do, and you are not done with that communication until you've received from the other person the feedback you're supposed to have.

one of the things that I teach my team or teach the, the, the, the, the groups that I work with is a method called the Empower Method. , which is are the steps that I learned to figure out how to lead people better, how to get out of me doing all the work, and how to get them to be their best selves. And so the seven steps of the framework basically are this, the, the first e is that you have to examine and evaluate your expectations. Right? You've gotta examine and evaluate your expectations to make sure that they're [00:16:00] actually reasonable.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Robert Heath Senior: often we are trying to do way too much right now. And as Bill Gates once said. We often overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in five, right? Sometimes we have to look at whether or not what we're trying to do is reasonable with the team that we have. So that's the first step I. two is then to manage their expectations.

'cause just like we have this lofty idea of what we can get done, the team that you work with, especially if you're good at your job and you have a good reputation, they're going to want to impress, they're want gonna want to do so much, so fast, and they're gonna get dissuaded if they're not moving as fast as they think they should.

So managing their expectations is extremely important. Step three, the P of Empower, you have to properly delegate and there's a number of steps when we talk, we walk through how you can delegate to people so that. They understand what is expected of them. They are empowered to do what is expected of them, and you are inspecting what they're doing [00:17:00] on a regular basis. The O of Empower is to optimize your environment for growth. What are the things that you can do as a leader to remove obstacles? What are the things that you can do as a leader to encourage and empower your people? Then the W is you have to watch and learn. the Marine Corps, we have a a planning process called Bais, right?

And there's six steps to this planning process. Most of it is planning, and then the last step is the S, which is supervise, The interesting thing that so many people forget is that they think that once I tell you what to do, now my job is done. As a matter of fact, once I tell you what to do, that's the very beginning of the hardest part of my job, which is watching and figuring out where you are struggling, where I can be of benefit from you, where for you, where I can remove obstacles for you. If you've ever heard of the Toyota production system in, in Tai Chio and the Ono Circle, one of the things that Tai Chio used to do in, in in [00:18:00] Toyota was he used to. Draw a circle on the ground and he would have his managers come and stand in the circle sometimes for an hour, sometimes two hours, sometimes three hours, and their whole job was to just watch the plant because it's amazing what you can learn when you just watch your people work.

Rob D. Willis: Hmm.

Robert Heath Senior: it's amazing the inefficiencies that you see when you just watch your people work. And that's one of the things that so many leaders get so busy that they don't set aside time to do. And so that's one of the things that I teach my leadership trainees and, and my clients to do last two steps, E and r.

E, is to engage their inner problem solver. So often, again, we are trying to solve all the problems, the further up you get in leadership, the less information you have about the problem. The less information, the less. Qualified you are to be the problem solver. And so I try to get people to take off their chief problem solver hats and to put on their chief obstacle remover hat, [00:19:00] Remove the obstacles for your team solving the problem rather than you doing it yourself. And then the last step R is to reinforce and reward what you want to continue.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Robert Heath Senior: So many times we get stuck in this feeling of I am. They are doing their jobs. They're getting paid a salary. That's good enough and what you have to understand is John is getting paid his salary and he's not doing excellent work.

He's doing just competent work. What we really pay people's salaries for is to not get fired. We don't pay people salaries to do excellent work.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm.

Robert Heath Senior: do you know? Because you pay the people who are doing great and the people who are not doing great roughly in the same band, right? It's not a ton of extra that you make.

You get promotions and you get things like that, but you don't at that level as long as you're doing competent work where you can't get fired. Everybody knows who's working hard and who's not. So we wanna make sure that we remember that we have to reward what we want to continue because positive reinforcement is the most powerful [00:20:00] method conditioning that we can use as human beings.

And if we reward certain behaviors, what we do is we train our teams to pay attention to those behaviors and to do those behaviors over and over and over again. And so that's our empower method. That's what I generally teach my leaders.

Rob D. Willis: when people are coming to you trying to solve so many problems, even when you are empowering your team to take care of them, there's still stuff which matters and stuff, which doesn't matter quite so much.

Have you got any go-to questions or processes to really filter out what is worth tackling first or right now?

Robert Heath Senior: Knowing what to do. Is almost as important as knowing how to do it. Right. And so often what I hear from leaders is that they are the captains of the fire brigade, AKA, they are always putting out fires. Right? so much of what we try to help them do, and there's a tool that we use it's in seven habits of [00:21:00] highly effective people. It's affectionately known as the Eisenhower Matrix. It's basically a tool that asks the question and puts things into four categories, whether it's important or whether it's just urgent, right?

And so you have four quadrants. You have things that are important and urgent. Everybody knows what to do with those. That's what we spend the most part of our day, the first part of our day doing. We knock those out. That's easy. You'll never get in trouble doing something that's important and urgent, right? But then most people get stuck. Focused on the next quadrant, which is actually the third quadrant. And it's a, it's, it's a trap quadrant, which is the, the group of things that are not important, but they're urgent. Their urgency masquerading is important, right? And those are the things that we have to learn to delegate. But there's a way that we have to learn to delegate them because the reason they can masquerade is importance, is because oftentimes the person who's bringing it to us is important, even though the issue is not.

Rob D. Willis: Hm.

Robert Heath Senior: And if we don't know how to navigate those relationships, then what we default to [00:22:00] is just allowing those things to take up all of our time. And that then keeps us from getting to the most important quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix us to be able to. Get what Jim Collins calls the flywheel effect, right? And that is the group of things that are important but not urgent. The group of things that if we can get to them now, we keep them from becoming urgent and therefore we are able to do, make better decisions and do them in a more efficient manner, rather than doing them in a a purely effective manner because they're urgent. And so that's one of the big tools that I help people to use is the Eisenhower Matrix. To really get out of the trap of the urgent masquerading is important and move into the quadrant of the important that's not urgent.

Rob D. Willis: I'd love to talk just a little bit about you personally and about that transition. Into working with business leaders, having been in the Marines. And I'm wondering, of [00:23:00] course, you know, power and the way it is distributed is different in different environments, and I'm wondering what was a big adjustment that you had to make moving out of the military and into civilian life?

Robert Heath Senior: Yeah. I think for me one of the biggest things, 'cause the, the early parts of my career had always been in the public sector. So I was a teacher, a public school teacher. Then when I was in law school, I worked at the law school. I was a dean's fellow for a year working in higher ed after I had graduated law school.

And then I was active duty in the military, in the federal government. And so. While I had run businesses myself, you know, small businesses, I had a jiujitsu school and I had done a, a, a distribution business. Before that, I had been a kind of small business entrepreneur in the private sector, but I hadn't existed in the corporate, in the private sector. And so one of the things that was most difficult, making the transition. Was really be being good at articulating the financial impact of the things that [00:24:00] we were doing. And, and it was, it was a blessing and a curse. The, the curse part of it was, it made it very difficult to make sales and to do things in the beginning of my business to, to help, to understand people, to, to help, to explain to people how this training, how this coaching, how this, this, this, this consulting would impact their bottom line. But what I began to notice also is that in, in the industry, specifically in my industry, in the leadership development industry, that's something that's not really understood in general. And so by learning how to do it and learning how one of the. talks that I do now is a talk called The Cost of Poor Communication, where I help businesses to figure out what is it costing you to not be good at this, right?

What are, what is the actual bottom line cost? What are the things that are being directly impacted by not being good at communication? And then what are some things that you can do to immediately begin to see impacts that will affect your bottom line? And so the blessing of it is I had to develop that skill, that ability to articulate these. These, these, these maxims of [00:25:00] leadership that matter in, you know, life or death and, and, and in military situations. But that didn't necessarily directly translate to the language that we have in the private sector of profit and loss statements and, and balance sheets. And so that was one of the things that, you know, now we are actually, that's the language that I speak when I work with my business owners.

When I work with my, the, the, the leadership teams that, that, that I deal with, one of the first things that we're trying to get to is how is this impacting your bottom line? How can you connect it and what can you measure that shows you that improvement here also means improvement There.

Rob D. Willis: Let's move to some rapid fire, favorite book on leadership.

Robert Heath Senior: So first one is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and the second one is Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal, general Stanley McChrystal.

podcast you've discovered recently.

I think the Pivot podcast in the US is Fred Taylor, Ryan Clark, and Channing Crowd are phenomenal. PO Podcast.

Rob D. Willis: Most underrated [00:26:00] leadership quality,

Robert Heath Senior: Listening.

Rob D. Willis: one Marine Corps principle. Every business should adopt.

Inspect what you expect.

A non-business story. So like a movie or a book or a story which inspires you.

Robert Heath Senior: The Alchemist by Palo Culo.

Rob D. Willis: One daily habit, which makes you a better leader.

Robert Heath Senior: I take time every morning to make sure that I'm living in alignment with my divine purpose, with the reason that I'm on this planet, so that I can then be the best servant to everybody that I'm entrusted to lead. I.

Rob D. Willis: Let's move to the listener challenge, and in this part of the pod we give listeners a ritual or an exercise, something to give them a little bit of your superpower. What have you got for us, Robert?

Robert Heath Senior: All right, so the big thing that I want people to look at is with problem solving. Getting to the root cause is something that people talk about a lot and everybody knows kind of, we [00:27:00] can pay lip service too, but how do we do it? And so there's, there's a maximum that I always kind of say to people when we start working on problems and it goes like this. Very rarely are we dealing with problem people. We have to remember that we're normally dealing with people that have problems. And when we can treat it that way, we can enlist those people to help us to solve the problems, or even we can work to help them solve their problems. And so what I tell people to do is to do three things.

There's three questions that you want to ask whenever you're dealing with any type of problem to get kind of to the root cause. The first question is, what is the problem? What are you dealing with? What's the actual root cause of the problem? What's the difference between what we want and what we have? The second question is, how is this problem keeping us from whatever our objective is? Right? How important is solving this problem to getting to our objective? Sometimes we have things that are important that we need to deal with. Sometimes we have things that we just walk around, right? It depends on what the problem is, how deep we [00:28:00] have to go into to fixing it.

And so then the third thing that I do, and this is a, a common. Practice in everything that I do, you'll see it in every one of my books. Defining success is extremely important. So there's a question that I have people to figure out before we start trying to figure on the how. We have to know what we're trying to do, where we're trying to go, what does success look like?

And so we ask this question, would we see? will we hear? What will we feel if this problem didn't exist? And we get very clear on what. goal looks like what success looks like. Then we know how to remove the problem, whether we need to remove all of it, whether we can just remove some of it or whether we can just ignore it to altogether.

I.

Rob D. Willis: Robert, where can people go to find out more about you?

Robert Heath Senior: Yeah, so the one place that you want to go is to our website is just tl LC g.com. Again, that's T as in Tom, L as in Larry, L as in Larry, C as in Charlie, G as in [00:29:00] golf.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn, Robert Heath, senior Double oh seven. Bond reference. I love the James Bond story. So Robert, he's senior oh oh seven at LinkedIn is also my handle.

You can find me there.

Rob D. Willis: Awesome stuff. Thank you for coming on, Robert.

Robert Heath Senior: Appreciate being here. It's been a pleasure, Rob.

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