The key to a successful life is finding balance in things. This requires you to know yourself, and constantly adjust to the situation. Mike takes us through his proven model on how to do that.
The key to a successful, fulfilled life is finding balance in all things. This requires you to know yourself, and constantly adjust to the situation. Mike takes us through his proven model on how to do that.
A fulcrum is a balance point. A successful, fulfilled life requires finding balance in almost every aspect. To do that, you must know yourself, others, and the situation and become the fulcrum, moving to provide balance in any situation.
Mike Lerario, host of the Objective Arete Podcast, is also a practitioner and teacher of leadership, management, and life balance. He covers the principles in his bestselling books "Leadership in Balance" and "Management in Balance." Learn how to achieve balance in your life. You must lead yourself first to truly be successful.
Full Guest Bio
Mike Lerario is President and Principal Consultant for Crispian Consulting Inc., a firm that provides specialized training and coaching in Leadership Development and organizational effectiveness. Additionally, Mike serves as a subject matter expert on numerous research projects for the Army and the Department of Defense.
A 1983 graduate of the United States Military Academy (West Point), Mike served 23 years as an Infantry Officer in Airborne Ranger assignments and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2006 after serving with the Joint Special Operations Command.
Mike’s Army career includes command assignments through battalion level. He has
multiple combat tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following his retirement from active duty, Mike worked as an Operational Advisor with the
U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) and with NATO training “Attack the
Network” and Counterinsurgency (COIN) Operations. He returned to Afghanistan in 2013
to assist in the training and development of the Afghan National Army Special Operations
Command (ANASOC) and in 2014 to serve as Senior Command Advisor to the three-star
commanding general of all NATO operational forces in Afghanistan.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (with a concentration in Military History)
and a Master of Art in Leadership Development, both degrees from the United States
Military Academy at West Point, NY.
Mike is the author of the 2016 Amazon.com International Best Seller Leadership in
Balance: The Fulcrum-Centric Plan for Emerging and High Potential Leaders. His second
book, Management in Balance: The Fulcrum-Centric Plan for New and Reluctant
Managers, was published in November 2022. He is currently working on a third book,
Solving the Leader’s Dilemma: Finding the Balance Between Leadership and
Management.
Mike hosts the Objective Arete Podcast and serves on the company’s Board of Advisors.Find Mike Lerario at:
email: mike@objectivearete.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-lerario-mld-343b994/
Sponsors: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the show. So Mike Lerario is our host. I am one of the guest hosts today. But Mike Lerario is somebody I met in 2013 in Afghanistan. I was in Army Special Forces. I was on a mission with some Afghan commandos. I remember walking into our operations center one day and there was this Fabulous looking gentleman.
Looked like Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse with facial hair. It looked like there was just a permanent fan in front of his face. His hair blowing back. Had a 45 on his hip, you know, in shape, in this sea of other weirdos. I'm like, man, this is a very interesting fellow. I gotta, I gotta know more about this person.
So we ended up becoming friends. He became one of my mentors in life, but he has an interesting background. He. A former West Point grad has a degree in leadership, done a lot of entrepreneurship. He's done many, many things that I'm not going to go into here, but what you can expect from this specific podcast, learning about Mike Lerario, is understanding the difference between leadership and management, how to balance some of your tendencies, like communication, how other people perceive you, the difference between having people that are motivated and people that are actually wanting to work intrinsically for a higher cause and all the nuances within that, so.
So,
Greg: Mike, grateful for you joining us today. One of the things that I really like about the books that you've written, as well as kind of your philosophy, it's very focused on balance in general. You use a term called be the fulcrum. It's one of those things that just resonates with me and what we're doing here because I do feel like so much of life is avoiding both excess.
And so I'm just curious if you can expound a little bit more on your experience with that and why that is such a topic for you, why that is something that you discuss so frequently.
Mike: Yeah. So be the fulcrum is, I guess if I had a tagline, that would be my tagline, I'd like to think of it more as a mantra.
It's my mantra. The thing I'd want the people who I work with to remember first and foremost. And balance is, I think, hugely important. Not only for me, not only for us, not only for most businesses. In nature, like, that's where we find harmony. Balance, right? When things can coexist and they work together.
And as I was writing my first book, Leadership and Balance, I had this image in my head of a playground seesaw. And a playground seesaw is simply a class one lever. You've got opposing weights, and you've got a lever, which is the seesaw board, and it balances on a fulcrum. And while, um, you can get people of different weights to be able to use a seesaw together by moving the heavier person in, that doesn't make a very good, uh, catchphrase.
You're like, Hey, move in or move out from the center to create balance, kind of wordy. And so what I thought about, and maybe I'd watched Caddyshack recently and be the ball was in my head or something, I don't know. But I thought, you know what, if you could be the fulcrum, if you could be the thing that creates balance, that generates balance, that finds and maintains balance, you could be such a powerful force in your life and in your organization.
And so the playground seesaw with leadership is the image I want people to think of, but I want them to have. Intentionality and to take action and the only way to do that is to be the fulcrum to be the thing that creates the balance because You shift when you have to you shift when the situation demands something of you that's different from how you naturally want to be And so that's that's where be the fulcrum comes from I think it's kind of landed in a lot of ways because often people go.
Oh, yeah He wrote that book be the fulcrum. I'm like, well, actually the book was leadership and balance, but thank you for Remembering at least that part of it and my website is is be the fulcrum because I thought that that was just a great and Easier thing for people to remember than my company name, which is Crispian Consulting So that's that's kind of two aspects of be the fulcrum.
I
Greg: mean that makes sense I feel like that's one of the things that it takes some maturity to grasp in that there isn't necessarily Black and white right or wrong and so so much of dealing with People is how do you adapt to get to best support that person? The best mentor them to get the best results for the organization as a whole.
Mike: Yeah, well, so I mean, we all with regards to leadership, leadership becomes very personal, right? We talk about people's leadership style because it's personal. I'll dress one way. Chuck's going to dress another way. I mean, the chaps aside, I mean, I think, you know, that's That's kind of, you know, we, we, we have a particular style and leadership is reflective of that because it is very personal.
But how we want to show up and what we wear on the outside as a leader isn't always appropriate, doesn't fit, doesn't work. And so when the situation demands something different of us than how we want to show up, well, we've got a choice. We can do nothing, let it ride, probably don't get the results we need, and we certainly probably make the people working with us unhappy.
Um, that's a choice. We can hope that it works itself out. But as we know, hope is really not sufficient. Hope is nice, but it's an insufficient condition to achieving what we want to do. The other option I think is to be intentional and to be the fulcrum and to shift in a way and to change in a way that allows the organization to recreate the balance that's needed to make things work.
Sponsors: You built a model within this too. It's like we have our domains and our model. Like what is your model? What are those, those tendencies?
Mike: So with regards to leadership, the model is. That there's four essential domains of leadership. Communication, adaptability, focus, and influence. Communication is bounded by the tendencies on one end of transmit and on the other end of receive.
Adaptability, it's on one end, it's bounded by rigid and on the other end by flexible. Focus is bounded on one end by selfish. or selfishness and on the other end by selflessness. And then influence, I, I bound in control on one end and command on the other. And what that really means is that with influence, you can either use direct influence telling people what to do and how to do it versus indirect influence, where you tell people what to do and why it's important and let them figure out how to do it.
And so all of those things are neither good nor bad. Being selfish, believe it or not, by itself is not bad. It's only bad in the context of. a situation where you shouldn't be selfish. You know, we, Ranger School, being in the Army, whatever, there's plenty of times where, you know, you want to share anything you've got with your teammates.
The example I use with people all the time is the yellow cup falling out of the cabinet in the airplane. Falling out of the ceiling in the airplane, right? That yellow cup comes out, they tell you in the briefing, if you're traveling with somebody that needs help. Put yours on first, before you help them.
And I'll ask people all the time, well, is that selfish? And they'll go, no. I'm like, well, it absolutely is. I mean, it's the exact definition of selfish. Taking care of yourself first. Like, yeah, but you, but that's so you can help somebody else. I'm like, exactly. It's the situation demands that you take care of yourself first, so you can take care of other people.
That's the rationale behind it. That's the justification for it. It doesn't change it from a selfish act to a selfless act. It's still a selfish act, but it's a selfish act that in the moment is required of you. And so, ideally, you're never in a situation where that yellow cup comes out for real because bad things are happening in an airplane where those yellow cups come out of the ceiling.
And it only takes a brief moment, but seconds count when hypoxia can set in. And so to me, that's like the best example of, in all of this model, Right? That the situation drives you to be something other than what you want to be. I wouldn't want to be with somebody who was inherently selfish, who wanted to be selfish.
But I want to work with somebody who recognizes that what they want for themselves is important. That what they want to achieve, that how they want to show up, those are important. And you can't be your best self if you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not looking out for yourself and what you want to achieve in life.
You just got to find the balance between that and being selfless. And probably if I were to, if I were to add one more thing besides be the fulcrum, it'd be Don't be a jerk. That would be, that would be my other tagline.
Greg: I feel like that'll get you so far in life, frankly.
Mike: Yeah, right? I think so, too. Um. Just being a good human being, right?
The essence of leadership. Being a better human being. Without a doubt.
Sponsors: It's actually one of our, our virtues within our model is politeness. Don't be, there's, there's times you have to be direct and kind of be more of an ass, but there's times when you can just do things because it's going to positively influence or impact somebody else.
But then there's that balance in the middle, too, where you had to bridge that gap. So, again, it's being the fulcrum within.
Mike: So, okay, balance, right, there's a lot of ways to think about balance. The scales of justice, right, we want to make sure that it equals out, right, the needs of society and the rights of the individual.
Scales, you know, where you come in and you take an unknown weight and you find when you create balance with known weights, then you know how much this unknown thing weighs. Think about the prospector coming into town with his bag of gold dust and the, the dude he rolls up with is like, got the weights on the other end of the scale and go, Oh, this is, you know, seven ounces of gold dust.
Here's what I'm going to pay you for that. That's balance in a sense, but that's not the balance I like to talk about mostly. The balance I like to talk about is equilibrium. Equipose is a word that, you know, comes across. Who would ever use that word? But it's a great word to talk about what I'm talking about.
And that's that balance is not making things equal. Like, not the balance that we're talking about most of the time. The balance we should be looking for is equilibrium. Not making things equal, but finding the equilibrium. And what that means is that things work together. Things work together in, in their appropriate portions, right?
And so, as an example, work life balance, right? How many times has someone thrown that in your face? Oh, you need to work on your work life balance. There is no way that most of us Especially if we're someone like you, Greg, when you started your business, right, Hatchet Brewing Company, that you were working probably 60 hours a week?
80 hours a week? How many hours a week were you working when you started that venture?
Greg: I was working at least 80 hours a week.
Mike: Yeah.
Greg: 50 ish to 60 hours a week at the full time job as a project manager for an engineering company, and then at least 20 hours on the weekend. And then driving to and from, yeah.
Mike: So you had your day job and you had the job you were moving to and doing all that. There's no way that you could have had 60 to 80 waking hours of time with your family at home, right? You could not make the time at work equal to the time at home if you're going to get any sleep. Even if it was only a couple hours a night, no way you're going to balance those two things out.
And make them equal. But what you could do, and what I think you've probably done, because you're here, you know, as a successful human being, is you found the equilibrium. And you find the equilibrium by, when you're home, you're home. When you're with your kids, you're with your kids. And so, you can't give them 80 hours a week, but you can give them every minute of your energy, of your attention, and that's how you find equilibrium.
And not that I suggest working 60 or 80 hours a week, and I doubt you do too, but, but if you approach it as a question of equilibrium, not making things equal, you'll never make them equal. That's a, that's a losing proposition. Find the equilibrium. And, and I'd say that that comes from recognizing and thinking in terms of both end, both work and home, not work or home.
That's dilemma thinking. Very few things in life are a dilemma. Very few things in life require you to choose between two equally bad things or two equally good things. You have to sometimes. But really, it's more a question of how much of one versus how much of the other. And if you can answer that through both end and finding equilibrium, you can be a much happier, much more successful person.
Sponsors: And you just move yourself along that fulcrum line, right? Be the fulcrum
Mike: baby. I almost, that was, be the fulcrum baby or be the fulcrum bitch would have been like my second and third choices of, of Or Joe Rogan. Or if I were Joe Rogan, I could probably get away with that. And, and I'd like to think of myself one day as the Joe Rogan with hair.
But maybe we'll see how successful this podcast could be.
Sponsors: Yeah. Right. Maybe he's asking you to take over his show. Maybe.
Mike: I don't know. I don't know.
Sponsors: Hey, I'm Chuck Ritter with Objective R Tay with a quick note from a few of our sponsors whose support allowed this show to thrive. First, Crispine Consulting.
Crispine Consulting is operated by our incredible podcast host, Mike Lerario. Mike is the author of two books. Leadership in Balance and Management in Balance, both based on his fulcrum centric model. Both books are available on Amazon, and I highly recommend them to any up and coming or experienced leader.
They are great, short reads that provide novel ways to reach your fullest potential as a leader. Check out Leadership in Balance and Management in Balance on Amazon, or go to the Crispine Consulting website at www. bethefulcrum. com. Also, the Project Sapient podcast. Project Sapient is hands down the best law enforcement and military community podcast out there.
It's produced and hosted by Army veteran, current law enforcement officer and author, Ayman Kafil. Ayman also serves as the editor in chief for Objective R Tay and he has over 100 published articles on various sites. Such as the Havoc Journal, which is also one of our sponsors. Check out Ayman's work on the Havoc Journal and check out the Project Sapient podcast, wherever you listen to your podcasts and back to the show.
Let's talk about this concept of leadership and management. You've written two books now. One is called Leadership and Balance and one is called Management and Balance. You wrote Leadership and Balance first. What's the difference?
Mike: Well, first of all, I only wrote Management and Balance because I've, I've.
have this third book I want to write that, uh, I won't talk about too much, but it's basically a book about finding the balance between leadership and management. And I thought before I do that, I need to define management. So leadership and balance is my attempt to define leadership in the four central domains.
Management and balance is my attempt to define management and what I consider to be the four central domains. And those are time, material, risk, and change. And it's really not a question of style, like leadership is, because management doesn't care what your style is. Management cares that you can deal with the conditions of abundance or scarcity, right?
And so, those four domains are bounded on one end by abundance, and on the other end, of scarcity. And so each of them has an abundance condition and a scarcity condition. And it's how you, and the image isn't a seesaw, the image is a pendulum, right? With management, you might have an abundance of material right now, but it's quite likely that a couple of months down the road when COVID hits and the ports are shut down, you find yourself with scarcity.
And so your job as a manager is to find the balance between the condition you're in right now. How do you make use of that condition and that time, that material, the risk or the change, and also how do you balance It's that against what's coming next. How do you prepare your team for what's coming next?
And so that's the balancing act of management. It's uh, can we get the job done with what we have? And can we keep people from becoming wasteful? Because if you have an abundance of material, you're going to become wasteful. And do we help prepare them for when we're lacking in resources? Like Kevin Owens said, you know, the most creative people he knows were poor.
I use that as a quote in Management in Balance because I heard that on the Pinal and Underground podcast. Brilliant concept, and it's true. Um, so the, so like the leadership concepts where none of those things that bound the leadership domains is good or bad on its own, you have to take them in context.
And so having an abundance of material or an abundance of time might be the preferred condition, but it's not necessarily good if it leads to wastefulness or being too deliberate in how you make your decisions. Having an abundance of risk is not necessarily a bad thing if it helps you consider the possibilities better.
If it helps you look not only how to mitigate risk, but where you can find acceptable risk. Because you're not going to win if you can't find acceptable risk. If you only look to mitigate a lot of risk. That's, that's the difference between the two. As I see it, my perspective, management is about process and leadership is about outcomes.
Management is about finding or mitigating the risk, and leadership is about finding acceptable risk. Those are two of the main characteristics about the differences between the two and how you balance them. You manage stuff, you lead people. That's another main difference between the two.
Greg: I like that that paradigm is very organized and it seems very applicable.
What do you see most people struggle with, though, in applying that? Because you talk about being the fulcrum, it seems like you have to have enough self awareness to realize, hey, I am the fulcrum and I'm not fulcruming where I should be. But is it that? Is that the issue? Is it more of a self awareness thing?
Or is it more of a, maybe a ideals thing? Like, hey, I don't care that the organization is suffering as long as I'm good.
Sponsors: Is that a word, though? Fulcruming, like I fulcrum, you fulcrum. I love it. It's like falconing. Like, you
Mike: know, I'm going to get a bird or a fulcrum that I can perch on my We're going to get a
Sponsors: trademark for that.
Okay,
Mike: alright. Get it done quick before we publish this podcast because someone else will do it. I think there's three things that have to happen, and self awareness is the beginning, the starting point, right? And so, you have to know your strengths, your weaknesses, you have to know your preferences. I created a, an assessment that people can take.
I call it the Leadership Fulcrum Assessment. It gives you a number for each of the four leadership domains. It's a starting point, right? And so knowing how you want to show up, knowing how you naturally show up, it's behaviorally based too. So it's not like, you know, I can say, well, I ought to be like this.
No, no. How have you been in the past? How have you performed in the past? How have you acted in the past? That's going to tell us what your preference is, what your tendency is. And so if you can be honest with yourself and go, yeah, I am a little bit selfish. Yeah. Or I get this a lot. Oh, there's people out there that are very selfless, or at least they want to be very selfless and that's great, but it can get you in a lot of trouble if you're doing it because you have a tendency to do too much.
Right. And not delegate. And when you want to take care of your people and you want to have empathy for your people, but you're not delegating when you ought to be delegating. So self awareness is the first, the first piece of it. The second piece of it is situational awareness. And that's knowing what is demanded of you in the moment, knowing what's demanded of you in these current conditions.
So there's a bit of the management piece that could come into that too. But with leadership, it's what does this situation demand of me in terms of how I'm communicating, how I'm making decisions and adapting, how I am. Putting my focus and attention for me, or is it for something bigger than me?
Something other than me? Am I giving, how am I influencing people? Is it directly because they've never done this before? Or is it indirectly because they're experts and they've been doing this for a while? And if I tell them how to do something, I'm just going to make them mad. So the situation drives everything.
And then the third piece of it is, do I have the skills? Do I have the confidence to be the fulcrum, right? Am I ready to be the fulcrum? And ready is a function of willing and able. Willing is a mindset issue. Able is a skill set issue. So you've got to be self aware. You've got to be situationally aware.
And you have to have the The skills and the attitudes to be the fulcrum, that's the model.
Greg: It's just interesting because it's, it's a relatively simple paradigm, this concept of balance. And yet it's applied to these complex situations, which I do think is a very valuable approach in life, right? We're, we're constantly trying to manage all these different variables.
I see in business every day, I look at, well, why did we do this? One day when last week we did this revenue wise performance wise, none of the variables that I'm aware of have significantly changed. So why is it such a different outcome? And so I do think there's a lot of value in trying to find a paradigm that is as applicable as what you're talking about.
You, you talk a lot about like motivations. in, in your model and kind of how to shape, we'll say, or tailor someone's actions to fit the motivations of individuals as far as a management and a leadership piece. I feel like we live in this world right now where we're inundated with social media, everybody's vying for our attention.
And so I, I feel like there's just this perhaps undue emphasis on external validation and extrinsic motivation. How does that apply? Within this like that you're talking about balancing intrinsic motivation extrinsic motivation within this model
Mike: Yeah So again, I think maybe you won't be surprised to hear me say that I think it's a question of both end thinking right like finding the equilibrium between extrinsically motivating factors carrots and sticks rewards and punishments and intrinsically motivating factors and and for that one, I would lean into Self determination theory our friend cc craft will probably talk about this when we get her on the podcast um There's three components to that.
It's this, uh, sense of belonging, right? That you're part of a team. That's one element of it. A sense of confidence and competence in your abilities. That's another component of self-determination theory. And the last one is a sense of autonomy. Do you have the ability to make choices and can you endorse those choices as being.
a part of not only what you want, but what the organization wants. Those are the three components. And so I think the key to success for us as leaders or even as human beings is finding the balance between the extrinsically motivating factors, some sort of acknowledgement, some sort of reward, some level of achievement, right?
That comes with. a paycheck. Balancing that against our need to be a part of a team, to believe in ourselves, and to have choices. And so if you can reinforce whenever you're giving someone a reward, like, hey, you're getting this because you're a great teammate, or you showed incredible skill, or you made great choices, then you're reinforcing the intrinsic motivation with this reward or this punishment that you're giving them.
That's a key aspect of it. I think another key aspect of it, and it's important to learn, especially as we're talking about so many different generations in the workforce right now. I think there's five or six generations in the workforce and it's, that's never been the case before. Boomers all the way down to whatever's after Gen X, Y, Z, whatever's.
In there, I was prepping for a session with a client in Austin, Texas recently, and I had Bloomberg surveillance on the TV at the time and they were interviewing a, an economist or a expert from ADP. And she said there was a recent survey that said most Gen Z workers would rather be unemployed. And as a baby boomer, I hear that and I go, are you kidding me?
Like how comfortable is your mom and dad's basement that you would rather be unemployed than unhappy. And it just reminds me, at least my perspective of it is that the people around you, whether that's family home or. The people who you work with, you need them to be motivated. You want them to be happy.
If you don't want them to be happy, you're a miserable human being and not a good person. You want people to be happy. That's not the same thing as needing them to be happy. You need them to be motivated to want to get the job done, but you want them to be happy. And so I think that's just an important distinction to make in finding the balance.
Like, can we do the things that motivates people and also makes them happy? Start there first. Start with what motivates people. And if it make, can make them happy too, because it's enjoyable, it uh, it allows them to share it with their friends, their dog, whatever, you know, whatever's going to make them happy, then do those, do those motivating factors that also help people be happy.
But don't get hung up on happy, you know, start with motivation and then work your way to morale.
Sponsors: It's kind of like be effective first and then work on efficiency. Exactly,
Mike: right? You can't be efficient first. You have to be effective first. Know what works. That's, yeah, that's a great analogy as well.
Greg: It's just the whole thing is fascinating.
I still think it's hard to identify those intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, at least for me. I think that, how do you see that actually play out though? Like how do you, you've talked about it a little bit, but again, how is that applied in the business world?
Mike: I guess, uh, one way I would approach it is recognizing that extrinsic motivators, rewards and punishments, you'll never be able to not use them.
Bonuses. You know, putting someone on notice because they didn't show up to work on time or they didn't show up, they took a, they took a day off when they didn't tell you they were going to take a day off, right? You just can't let those things go. So whether it's, you know, firing somebody, the ultimate punishment, or putting them on notice, or maybe you, you dock their pay.
In the military, we had quite a, quite a, uh, repertoire of punishments to use with people through the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the, uh, non judicial punishments that we could, uh, we could, uh, issue out. You have to recognize that those will always be there and should be there, and it's funny because when I'm working with my clients, I have, sometimes I have a hard time recognizing the punishment aspect of it, and a lot of that's driven by, okay, well, what's acceptable with HR and.
And most of them don't even know, they don't even know what their HR policies are regarding reprimands or regarding, um, punishing, quote unquote, punishing somebody for something. But know what those are. I, I think, you know, going into it, you gotta know what is in my toolbox in terms of a reward and a punishment.
And then secondly, this, again, understand that intrinsic motivation is a function of Do people feel like they're part of a team? You might use the term family, and I've run into this with a lot of people, like, Go on. No. Family's different. You got no choice in who family is. You've got a choice with who you work with.
You've got a choice with who you put on your team. And I think there's some truth to that, right? And so, what I would say is, What I've discovered over time is, I find my greatest success is when I treat my workers a little bit more like family and when I treat my family a little bit more like workers.
As an aside, I, I never yelled at soldiers. I don't think. I don't think I ever yelled at a soldier. I yelled at my kids. Man, I was, I could be a total jerk to my kids growing up. I regret it, hugely. And it's, but it's just for some reason that's how I showed up at home. And so, if I'd have recognized that a sense of belonging, a sense of team.
A sense of family. It kind of goes both ways. If I could have treated my family a little bit more like I treated my soldiers sometimes? You know, I don't know. Anyway, so I think that that's, that's a key element of it. You have got to be able to tap into what makes someone feel like they're part of a team.
What makes someone feel like they are getting better at their job. What makes someone recognize they have choices? So it could be a simple thing as like, you've done well, I want to reward you for your performance. I could give you a gift card or I could send you to some additional training, right? I could let you choose what that training is and I could let you take your family along with you or pick another coworker to go with you.
Somebody who you think Now, in that reward that I'm giving you, I've just touched on all three of the intrinsic motivating fact, right? I let you build the team or the other person you're going to bring with you. I let you choose where you're going to go. I'm rewarding you for your skills, and I'm giving you an opportunity to learn more skills.
Now, another way I could build on that is when you come back, have you briefed what you learned. Have you shared the lessons? Have you shared the networks that are available out there? Or what is going on in this conference that I just sent you to? That's a way to reward people, but do it in a way that builds their motivation.
And I think it just takes a little bit of effort and a little bit of thinking on it. But that's, that's how you find the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Greg: It's interesting too, I think that it's easy to fall into the trap of Hey, the reward is financial or the reward is it's not deep and you're touching on these deeper motivations that people have that actually bring them more fulfillment and more of that sense of reward, which is probably much more powerful than just a bonus or a commission,
Mike: man.
I'll tell you what, a handwritten note. Oh my God, that there's some power to that as well. I mean, cause first of all, most people these days never get a handwritten note and, but even if they haven't, when they get one, they understand the effort that goes into that. And so if you're thanking somebody for whatever they've done and you're complimenting them on whatever they've done and you're showing that you appreciate it, not only by telling them, but by telling them in a written note, that's a big deal.
Hell, I've got a, I've got a handwritten note on my desk that's right next to my picture of Patton and Nutz McAuliffe and Steve Chapuis from the 101st at Bastogne. It is a note from a good friend of mine, a good friend of Chuck's, a guy by the name of Mike Longo. And he was complimenting me on my creativity and the work I've done with his company.
And that meant so much to me, not just because I, I value his opinion as a successful executive and a successful entrepreneur. I value his friendship and I appreciate the fact that he took the time to hand write a note. That's powerful stuff, right? And so, every day, when I'm at my desk, well, I'm not at my desk every day, thank God, but on days when I'm at my desk, and if I struggle or if I'm thinking about, like, oh my God, I can't write this next paragraph to this next book, and I look over at that note and I go, well, Mike Longo believes in me, so maybe I should believe in me.
Yep, I can do this. I got this.
Greg: Well, it reminds me of what we were talking about earlier, too, with the self awareness, right? Mike Longo obviously knew that that was something that would resonate with you. Uh, and so I think to your point earlier, I think that you also have to know your people and maybe the financial solution is the one that's going to resonate with them the most.
So that isn't necessarily the wrong decision, but it's just, it reiterates that very important point of just knowing your people and having the self awareness to understand yourself, but also the empathy to understand where other people are coming from.
Mike: Yeah, that's what makes leadership so hard, right?
Because everybody's different, you know, and that's another thing I like to remind people is that when we start talking about, um, Oh, you got to treat everybody the same. Absolutely not. You got to treat everybody fairly. You got to treat everybody as equals, but none of us. None of us is the same. You cannot treat everybody the same.
You have to meet people where they're at, and you have to treat them based on the situation. Whether, if we're talking rewards and punishments, treat everybody fairly, treat everybody as equals, but never treat everybody the same, because none of us is the same.
Sponsors: It's interesting you bring up the note. I was recently with a good friend of mine named Kevin Crawford.
And one of the things he recommended, he's like, Chuck, I'm going to give you this advice. He's like, I was sitting down with a billionaire once upon a time, and the piece of advice he gave me is like, hey, take your logo, or your family crest, or whatever it might be, make some stationery, and take some time every day to write some handwritten notes to people, thanking them for, for something that you're grateful for.
He's like, that's been one of my keys to success, because A, it helps me, I feel like I'm practicing gratitude, but when the person receives that, they know, crappy handwriting and all, that you took some time out of your day, and wrote this thing, and then had to take the time to mail it.
Mike: And so right there, that right there is you're, you're building a sense of belonging, relatedness, right?
You're, you're building a team, you're building a bigger network. You're probably addressing some competency in that note. You personally are reflecting in writing that note, right? You're thinking about it and you're taking the time and where's the impact that I can have in doing this. And so all those things are good things that develop your self awareness.
They develop your skills and dealing with other people. And ultimately it's going to help you build a Better, stronger, bigger team.
Sponsors: All right, your next question, Mike, it's a big one. What was your biggest failure in life and what did you learn from it?
Mike: My biggest failure in life, because hopefully there's not things that I've done that will come back to haunt me that will turn out to be a bigger failure.
I would say the thing that that does haunt me though is I was not as good a battalion commander as I should have been or could have been. I retired as a lieutenant colonel, not because I wanted to, but because I didn't get promoted. I wasn't selected for brigade. I approached that in a way that was probably in some ways selfish, right?
I was thinking about what I wanted to do. with being a battalion commander. And if I, and again, this is the selfish versus selfless, uh, aspects of focus. It's, depends on who's looking and who's, who's assigning a value to this. If I, I was doing it the way I wanted to do it, but if I had been either more selfish or more selfless, I would have approached it perhaps the way my 1st Brigade commander and the division commander wanted me to approach things.
It may not have made it any different. If I'd have thought about what was going on in the army, or where my greater opportunities were for advancement and promotion, I would never have come back to Fort Bragg. I would have gone back to the 101st and Fort Campbell, or I might have tried to go to an overseas battalion in a separate brigade.
But I didn't approach my career or advancement that way. I was Man, I was so happy to be a battalion commander, man, I commanded the same battalion that John Wayne commanded. Did you know that? In the movie The Longest Day, John Wayne plays the part of Ben Vandervoort, the commander of 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry.
And it's funny because my grandson is totally into D Day and World War II right now, and so we recently watched The Longest Day together. And um, To me that was like, oh my god, you know, this is the legacy that I've taken over. Lloyd Austin commanded 2505. Uh, Joe Anderson commanded 2505. A lot of really good people commanded 2505.
And, uh, I think that was, in some ways I think about that as the biggest failure that I had because I didn't get promoted, I left the army as a lieutenant colonel. But then I have to stop and think a minute. And go, wait a minute, it wasn't, it wasn't all bad. I've got relationships now with people who served in that battalion that they're guys I know would do anything for me and I would do anything for them.
Daniel Metzdorf lost a leg in Iraq six months after I gave up command of the battalion. Jimmy Bates was one of my, uh, mortar, he was in Charlie Company with the mortars. Figured out he had a brain tumor. sent him home from Afghanistan. Totally in remission now, and he's off, he's got a non profit helping soldiers.
I don't think the relationships I have with those, in particular those two men, and other people who'd been in the battalion, would be the same if I was a total failure. But it felt like failure for the longest time, and it nagged at me, and it caused me maybe to not make choices or take chances that I should have while, both while I was in command, because you know, you're commanded for about two years, but I knew, I knew about halfway through it.
Because of some things that happened that, you know, I was probably done. So, but I'm still in command, right? So what do I do? And I did what I thought was the right thing to take care of my men. To take care of the soldiers in my battalion. But the outcome was, all the trappings of success were not what I experienced.
So what did I learn from that? What I learned from that was, is that you have to follow your own standards, your own compass. Like, at the time, I thought, well, okay, I could have, if I'd have made my bosses happier, then maybe I'd have gotten, you know, things would have turned out differently. But what's the real measure of success there, right?
Is the real measure of success Mike Lerario gets promoted and commands a brigade? Or is the real measure of success the lives of the people who served with me, right, and where they are today? And I've realized that I'll go with the latter over the former. So I, you know, it's a daily, a daily struggle to reevaluate success.
A daily struggle to appreciate what I've done, appreciate what's happened for me and to me, and the fact that, you know, I probably never would have met you, Chuck Ritter, if I'd gone on to bigger and better things in the army. And if that's the case, then I never meet you, Greg. Uh, if that's the case, who knows where my life would have taken me.
Would I have been promoted to full colonel and spent the rest of my career in the Pentagon being miserable? Probably, right? So I mean, I guess from an objective standard, my biggest failure was not being quote unquote successful as a battalion commander. Maybe that's a too easy answer because as I've expressed it now, shit man, I mean, 20 years after the fact, I gave up command in 2003, that in fact, it wasn't the failure I thought it was when it first happened to me.
It's helped me become, I think, more appreciative of what I have. Uh, more deliberate in the choices I make, more intentional in the outcomes that I pursue, and I probably never would have written the books that I've written without that experience. So, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's the failure that turned into success, I hope.
Sponsors: Hey, I'm Chuck Ritter with Invective Arte, with a quick note from a few of our sponsors whose support allow this show to thrive. The Havoc Journal is known as the voice of the veteran community. It's an online journal that has content for everyone. It's my go to source for news, fitness, and leadership themed articles.
They've even been nice enough to let me publish a few articles on their site. I generally start my day reading news articles on the Havoc Journal to get motivated for what's ahead. Check them out at www. havocjournal. com. I'm Inkofl, our amazing Editor in Chief at Objective RTA. is also an accomplished author.
Not only has he published well over 100 articles, he recently wrote a book entitled The Resolute Path. The Resolute Path is a collection of all of Iman's articles, poems, and stories over the years from his perspective as a survivor of multiple civil wars, an immigrant to the United States, his time in the military, and his current role as a law enforcement officer.
Iman has an incredible story and great insights into mental performance, training. And how to be a better human being. You can find The Resolute Path at Amazon. It's an amazing read and I highly recommend it for anyone. And back to the show.
Greg: Well, it sounds like an experience where you learn to better define what success actually is.
And that's one of the things I think we all struggle with. To your point, it doesn't necessarily mean what the army would define as success, going from one command to the next and hitting all the right staff positions as an officer. That's one of the things that I'd say was comforting about being in the military.
I knew, hey, this is my future. Over the next four years, I'm going to hit this role, then this role, and this role. If I'm doing well, I'm going to get these OERs, etc. Uh, and that's, it's intimidating leaving that environment because it's very much what you define. And so, it's learning, it just sounds like such an important lesson that I'm still trying to learn myself.
But how do you define success personally?
Mike: Yeah, I think that's essential and not being afraid to reevaluate as, as you're on your journey, as you're going down a particular path. What seems like failure in one Sense could actually be a huge success because it refocuses your mind, it refocuses your attention, it allows you to make choices.
I probably would not have gotten out of the army until much later, clearly, right? And yet when I, getting out when I did opened up a lot of doors for me. Yeah, so again, I think that's the other thing about regret, right? Like if you regret one thing in your life, you have to acknowledge that you regret everything else that followed, right?
Because if it wasn't for that failure, you wouldn't be where you are today. And so that's where I try to live with like, this recognition that don't have regrets, just, just have lessons learned.
Greg: That's a way better way of looking at it. I've never heard it put that way, but it's, it makes so much sense.
It's a very logical way of looking at it.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think so, because it's like, it's, what's that saying, you know, that you can walk through a river You can never walk through the same river twice, because the water is different and you're different with each, with each step. I, I'm, I'm probably butchering that.
And so it's the same thing. If you regret something in your past, by extension, you, you should regret everything that followed. Right? Because if it wasn't for that failure that you regret, you wouldn't be where you are today probably. So, no regrets. That's the lesson learned there. Just, just learn and grow.
Find some arate. That's what you need.
Greg: Be the fulcrum. Be the fulcrum, baby. I mean, it's clear you've gone through a lot of what we would call maybe self developmental challenges.
Mike: Ask my wife, you'll get a different answer.
Greg: I can't help, but even in what I do at business and what we've done in the military, like you think of ranger school and the number of people that just outright quit.
It's such a constant option. How have you dealt with that in your own experience? Have you felt like quitting? Have you felt overwhelmed? And then, in those situations, what did you do? Like, how did you address that?
Mike: Uh, yeah, I think, without knowing it, in a lot of cases, I think it was, What's the team? Who's around me?
Why did I do this in the first place? What do I want to achieve from it? Here's another failure. I mean, Delta Selection. I was recruited as a major at, the Command and General Staff College to go to Delta Selection. Did it, uh, made it through the end of the physical phase of it, but just not fast enough. So I got dropped.
I thought that was a huge failure, but there was a guy who helped me on to the back of a truck. And the guys who were, who were working with me at that time, or who were doing support, were the same guys that were in Mogadishu in 93. It was that group of guys. And when they told me up, sorry, you didn't make it in time.
This guy was helping me onto the back of a truck, and he, or no, it's when he was helping me off the back of the truck when we got back to the place where we were, uh, living out of. Uh, he said to me, Hey, just remember, the only failure is not trying. I was like, wow, man, I don't think anybody could have said anything to me in the moment that was more impactful than that.
And so I came out of that Not bitter, but resolved to, my chance was done, but I was on a mission to find people who could work in that organization and could succeed. And I found a couple, and I basically recruited them to go and go through that process. And they did very well in a, well let's just say a special mission unit in the United States Army.
And so, uh, failure perhaps turned into success for some other people. And, um, so you learn, you grow, you approach things differently, perhaps, but, but I think that's lean into, lean into what you were, why you were doing it in the first place. I was doing it because I thought I was never gonna command a battalion.
Crazy, right? I, I went to Delta selection because I thought I was never gonna command a battalion. I, I failed at Delta selection and I end up in the hundred first and the next thing I know. I'm not only a battalion operations officer, but they make me the brigade operations officer. And I become a battalion commander.
And so it's like, what was my real objective then? I think my real objective was to test my limits. You know, as a major in the army, I'd probably done everything I could do at that point that would really challenge me. So that's success and failure and where you're at in any given moment. You know, I think it's, you've gotta dig deep and you gotta remember why you're there.
And recognize that what you think you want isn't exactly what you're going to get out of it. Because what I got out of it was way different than what I thought I was going to get out of it. And again, I can't regret, I can't regret failing at that without regretting the time I spent at Fort Campbell.
The time I spent in Hawaii as the Director of Operations for POWMIA Recovery from the Vietnam War. And what we did there, what I did there to help families. Find closure from the Vietnam War. Uh, the people I worked with in the 82nd as a battalion commander, the people I worked with, uh, in special operations command in my last, my last job, me, you know, working at Wexford and going down range with the asymmetric warfare group and meeting Chuck Ritter.
Like, all that is a regret, too, if I regret. Failing at Delta Selection. So, probably need to go back and think about what your first question was there, but I think it's, it's remember why you do, why you did it in the first place, and think about what you're getting out of it, and just don't regret anything, regardless of how it turns out.
That's, I think, the biggest thing about failure. You haven't really failed until you quit, so don't quit. Don't ever quit.
Sponsors: Alright, Mike. So you're the You're the new podcast host, right? Yes. Me and Greg are just guest hosting for this specific episode. I'm sure we'll guest host other episodes, right? But you're the primary, you're the mastermind, if you will.
So, share with us in the audience, like, where are you gonna take this thing? Like, why should people join us on this ride?
Mike: Yeah. Well, so, first of all, I think I go back to episode one, and when you described objective and the domains, like we're going to cover all of those domains. It won't be, you know, just a bunch of old army guys sitting around talking.
We're going to bring in people who are experts in all kinds of fields with vast experience. And we're going to dig. a little deep. We're going to find out what's really going on across these domains. People should listen because they're going to learn something. They're going to, they're going to meet people that they didn't know were out there doing things they didn't know they were doing, and they'll be able to reflect on their own lives and go.
Maybe I should approach it that way. I think that's one of the things about it that's, that's most exciting for me. I'm really interested in my own growth. Honestly. There, there wasn't a single thing you mentioned in episode one about what this is about and the areas where someone can learn and grow in.
Especially the fortitudinal, right? Like, that's one I really want to get into. Yeah, I think it's going to be a A wide ranging, the intention is that we're going to be interesting, we're going to be informative. Here's what I tell people all the time about, um, communicating anything. You, you have a task to be informative, tell people something they don't know, interesting, hold their attention, concise.
We thank Joseph McCormick for that one, right? Brevity. And compelling. You've got to get people to want to do something. And so that's what we're going to do in this podcast. We're going to be informative, be interesting, concise and compelling. That's our mission. But to help people across all eight of those domains.
Sponsors: Awesome. I'd like to wrap this up just by saying that we are recording here in the Brief Lab, and as you said, Joe McCormick, like, he's allowed us to use this space for our own learning, and also our own building this, this concept of Objective RT, and that's, that's pretty awesome. So, I'm a big fan of his books, I know you are, I know Greg is.
Oh yeah. Check them out. I mean They're fantastic. Yeah.
Mike: Next to my books, I think I've given away his book more than anybody
Sponsors: else's. Every time you come across him, it's a long way to go, like, hey, let me Yeah. Here's his book. So I don't have to do this again.
Mike: Yeah,
Greg: I like it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us on the Objective Erratae podcast.
Thanks to our guest today and future host for all our future podcasts, Mr. Mike Lerario, and sharing some of his experiences and giving us more things to think about in regard to how to live with balance. In our next few episodes, we're going to be talking about myself and Chuck. In this very next episode, we'll be talking a little bit about my life, and I'll be sharing some of my failures and some of the experiences I've had.
that might resonate with you and might be something you can use to benefit your own situation. So with that, please like subscribe and share this podcast with whomever you think it might be of benefit to, and we'll see you on the next
one.