Rob Abbott: Leadership Lessons from the Battlefield

Music. Right? Preparation, conduct, and integration. And what integration is, is all the participants get together and the participants have to speak for several minutes about what is it that they learned?

What was the aha thing that they learned that they didn't know? And what are they going to do to make themselves a better leader going forward? I mean, they have to commit to this This is one thing that I'm going to do to make myself a better leader going forward. And to me, that is the most important part of the step, right? Because if you go through this 16 hours on the battlefield and you don't commit to being better, you've kind of wasting your company's time and money.

And integration tends to be very, very powerful. Even when you have a room of 30 people, or I have a room of 120 people, and they all stand up for 30 seconds and say, this is what I'm going to do to make myself better. Let me welcome you to Mindful Leader. My name is Dennis Shaw, and I am the host of Mindful Leader. This particular podcast is scheduled for release on January the 6th, 2025, and it is my plan in 2025 for this podcast to move from twice a month to every week.

Our guest today is going to talk to the topic of leadership from a military perspective. I will introduce him and the two clergy from the Mountain Sky Conference. You're going to be part of the conversation in a moment or two. But before I do that, I would like to indicate to you that it is my plan to address a little bit of what I want to do for 2025, either next week, the 13th, or the 20th or the 27th.

Somewhere in there, I'm going to have a conversation about sort of my why and what's going on with Mindful Leader and how it is that I see our role here. But a little quick snapshot of that is that my why is about helping others to become better leaders, to be all that they can be as good leaders. I am a retired military officer. I am a retired Methodist pastor. I am a bit of a muse at times. I think that probably goes with being a pastor.

I'm a mentor. And in that mentor role, I have done a lot of leadership development, leader nurturing. At one time, I was a marathoner. I qualified and ran for the Boston Marathon. And I qualified in 87, ran it in 88. And I'm a bit of a math nerd. I'm certainly not an engineer-level math nerd, but I find math interesting. I'm a big fan of it. I believe all of those combined to help make me able to discuss leadership from a fairly broad level.

And it's my hope that I can help you have a more complete tool belt, leadership tool belt. My own observation is, is that when the only tool you have in your tool belt is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail. So I just want to emphasize that for you.

If anything that I say in any particular podcast, anything that the guests say in any particular podcast has meaning for you, or you listen to the podcast and you think that, you know, there are people at my church that might want to listen to this, don't hesitate to forward it to them and let them know that it's there. Like I indicate, we're going to go to once a week, and you can find that on your podcast service. I personally use Overcast as my podcast service, but you can use Apple.

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My guest today is Rob Abbott, and Rob is a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, and he is also a retired United States Marine, and he has led staff rides on the subject of leadership for both Princeton University and George Mason, which is a large university within the state system in Fairfax, Virginia. Welcome, Rob. It's good to see you. Thank you for saying yes to this. Thank you very much, Dennis. So important. And I have two other guests on here

today with me. That's Jeremiah Harris. He's the pastor at Longs Peak in Longmont, Colorado, and Bryson Lilly, and he's the pastor at Trinity Loveland in Loveland, Colorado. And they have both attended some programs or a program that Rob has conducted at Gettysburg. Actually, it was at Antietam, wasn't it? It was where the program was. Yeah, we've done both. You have been to Gettysburg and at Tietam as well. Gettysburg and at Tietam. But welcome, Jeremiah. Welcome, Bryson.

Thank you for saying yes to being on here as guest as well. Absolutely. Happy to be with you, Dennis. Rob, you use battlefield examples that convey to leaders in the 21st century, be they corporate leaders or they nonprofit leaders or things like that.

Would you like to offer me an example of what you might say to someone who doesn't have an experience with what you're going to your program and how it is that you take that particular example and perhaps share that with them that they could use at work?

Their corporate headquarters or perhaps at the local church could you offer me an example of that well let me let me back up a little bit and give you a little bit of a little bit of insight before i will ask your question but just got to give me a couple minutes so a licensed battlefield guide these are i'm a federal guide gettysport's the only battlefield in the country that requires a federal guide we have about i don't know about 120 of us left we got a test coming up this weekend,

and it's a big deal. It's about a 5% pass rate.

It's a tough cut to be a backflip guy. I've been a guide for about 10 years. But in the last four or five years, I've stopped doing family tours and now all I do is leadership work. And what I'm doing is what's called a staff rod. Staff rod. It's not a tour. There's a difference. Tour is just straight history or a staff rod is very interactive. And this goes back to the time of Prussia, pre-Germany, when the Prussians keep getting their butts handed to them by a guy named Napoleon.

And the Prussians have to figure a way to win. And one of the things they come up with is the idea of putting officers on horses and taking them out on the battlefield. And you got to go to where the general would have been and look at what the general would have reasonably seen and talk about what the general would have reasonably known, and only then can you begin the leadership discussion. So when people think about this, we think we're talking straight history and

tactics. That's not at all what we're talking about. Well, all we're doing is we're using the history to set up the leadership discussion. So Gettysburg is a national military park. It's not really a national park. It's a military park. And the reason that's important is these parks are created by the War Department for the express purpose of training the military. We've been doing that for a long time, since 1896, and we have nine military parts in the country.

And we still do military training today. Now, of the groups I work with, about a third are military, about a third are first responders, and about a third are corporate. So we get a lot of civilian organizations, Shell and Amazon and FedEx and Sherman Williams and people like this. And this is how I ended up with Bryson and Jeremiah, as I'm working with a nonprofit called the Gettysburg Foundation. They are the cheapest in the business, and they're the best quality and the

least expensive company to do a leadership program. I work for the Gettysburg Foundation. And they called me up and said, I got a couple of Methodist ministers. I got some Methodist ministers that want a staff ride, a three-day staff ride. I'm like, okay, this is a little unusual. I don't normally work with Methodists. I don't work with clergy. I mean, not normally. And clergy are normal by definition.

And these two in particular. so i call these guys up and i'm talking to them to set up the program and i said okay you want a three-day stop ride and they're like yeah and i said how many people i said two which kind of rocked me back and it was like what do you mean two i mean i expected you to say 30 and, You want a three-day program for two people? Yeah, that's what we want. I'm not a life coach. That's not my calling in life. I run staff rides.

I need a little explanation here. Can you explain to me why your parish is going to fly you all the way across the country to do a three-day program? He says, well, the Baptist Church is splitting over the issue of LBGT rides. And okay, and there was an awkward silence and it was like, and I said, okay let me guess, you're conservative and you're parish I say again you're inclusive, and you're parish is conservative and they're like, yeah okay, I'm in, I'll do that, I'd be happy to do that.

That does take you to 1861 in its own way It really does Yes, it does. And so when they came out there, I mean, Jeremiah and Bryson both love the Civil War and they both love the battle. And I don't know that they knew what they were getting themselves into. But very quickly, we'd get out there on the battlefield and orient them. Okay, it's July 1st, 1030 in the morning, first day. You know, here's the specific historical situation.

So I'll give you an example. June 30th, the lead Confederate brigade commander is a guy named Johnson Pettigrew. He's coming down the road from the West. He's been told that Gettysburg is defended by militia and don't fight, don't get in an engagement. And the lead commander looks out and sees Union cavalry out there. And he goes back and says, hey, that's not militia, that's Union cavalry. And nobody won't believe him.

His division commander won't believe him. His corps commander won't believe him. And he ends up getting rotated to the back and they bring somebody else forward. So the first discussion we have is what's going on here? I mean, why does nobody believe this guy? And in a staff ride, I'm only going to do maybe 20% of the talk and the rest of the talk is being done by the participants. And if there's only two people in the group, it's hard to hide.

So it's, and now Bryce and Jeremiah are very engaging and very, very eloquent. And they were more than happy to talk. And we got a good discussion going from the beginning. So, but that's a good example of how this thing works. Yeah, I would say the Bible is, or the battlefield is just the parable. And so, you know, Jesus spoke in parables. And so, yeah, Rob would give us the story of what's going on June 30.

And it was, you know, 15 minutes of him talking. And then for us, it was, okay, now how does this relate to your ministry setting? Where do you find yourself in the picture or other situations? And so that's where the hard work comes in as far as on the clergy side or how you're going to integrate that into your own context. And it's in a way that's... And it's infinitely harder for you because you are volunteer organizations. You don't have military discipline to fall back on.

So you've got to be a heck of a lot more subtle and a heck of a lot more persuasive to get people to do jobs as volunteers, I would imagine. It's true. Absolutely true. You can't command them and get them to do anything. Invitation is key. That's what I try to make sure people understand. When I suggest that you can apply military leadership to the church, I consistently say you can't lead a church like you would lead a rifle battalion.

It's different, but there are still some principles that flow over. But going back to your comment about a volunteer, now, of course, I realize that what I'm about to say may be apocryphal, But you have that scene from the movie about Gettysburg, where is it, Jeff Daniels? Jeff Daniels has to persuade members of the second main to join him at the 20th main, because they believe their enlistment contract has run out, and they are not happy about having to continue to serve.

And I don't know if that really happened or not, but my guess is some kind of element of that kind of thing happened where people had to be persuasive on the battlefield to keep people from running away and leaving. And you couldn't use an approach of, if you run away, I'll shoot you. That just would not have worked. It does happen, but it's three weeks prior to the battle. It's not the day of the battle like it's depicted in the movie.

And Chamberlain really does give that speech and he really does give those results, get those results. Yeah, it was. And I think he did it by just being honest to him. He basically told him what the story was and why they needed to come along. Yeah, a lot of people think, you know, I don't want to do a staff ride because I don't want to hear the Confederate perspective. Or why am I worshiping a Confederate officer who's owning sledge?

Or I don't want to do a staff ride because I don't want to talk tactics the whole time. Well, that's not what we're doing. I mean, we're out there looking at people. It doesn't really matter whether they're blue or they're gray or whether they're fighting to preserve the Union or they're fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. We're talking about people. And people have different agendas and people want different things.

And the things that we're talking about, we're not talking about tactics. I mean, I'm very briefly going to discuss tactics just so that you can visualize what's happening out there. But the key issues that we're talking about in a staff ride are personal relationships, clear communications, and trust, building trust relationships. And these are principles that extend over way beyond the military, all through civilian organizations.

I would imagine they extend all through your church, that if you don't have those things, you're going to have a hard time. Yeah. My observation is that the church in some cases represents the country writ large and the fact that trust is in short supply in the church. And I'm with you. I think part of, in essence, one of the critical elements of leadership is trust. So from your example of Gettysburg or perhaps Antietam, how do you build trust?

How do you use an example from either one of those battlefields as to how you go about building trust? Well, we say that in the Marine Corps, we say that we can surge a lot of things. I can surge air support and logistics and mortars and artillery and money, but the one thing I can't surge is trust. I can't call you on the phone and say, hey, you have to trust me because that never works. I mean, that has the opposite effect. So you have to build trust relationships long before you need them,

whether you need them or not. You just need to build. And the way you build trust relationships, you know, the term trustworthy means to be worthy of trust. You have to demonstrate that you're worthy of being trusted. And it starts with a discussion. It starts with a dialogue with no agenda on the table. You just got to get talking. You just got to start the process. And during a staff ride, I encourage people to think about a bad relationship that they have.

And is it in their best interest to fix that relation? And what are they going to do to start the process of fixing that relationship? I don't know. Jeremiah, Bryson, it's not me talking. It's supposed to be you talking. Well, I think, go ahead, Bryson. I was going to say this idea of trust, yeah, especially in a volunteer organization is critical because, again, we can't compel our lady, our congregants to do anything. It's all invitational.

And the value of the staff ride in this regard is we're able to see little vignettes of situations where trust was not given and something bad happened on the field. Conversely, there's examples where, to throw specifics out, when Governor Warren rides up to a guy named Patty O'Rourke and tells him, hey, I need one of your regiments because this part of the line over here on this hill is about to be swept away.

And because Warren had been his brigade commander, because Warren had taken the time to interact with O'Rourke and form a relationship with him, O'Rourke said. All right, let's do this, and went straight into the fray. And it proved to be one of the pivotal points of that part of the battle. So as Rob said, the trust that he sowed earlier came to fruition exactly when it was needed. So I guess I'm just echoing this idea of the importance of trust and how you

can see it in a battle like Gettysburg. And even though it's an example on the field, that example will be in any organization people find themselves in. I'll apply it to how I actually serve as a leader within the church. And at one of the discussions that we had was talking about that a good commander, a good leader, knows the point on the battlefield where they can do the most good.

And so when I'm looking at what I do in the church, is it attending this meeting or this meeting, or am I just showing up to wave my hat here, or do I have this obligation? I can balance my own life by sorting out what are the things that are really pertinent. And then tangential to that is Rob taught us a lesson, if he wants to succinctly put it, but it's called the fingertip feel.

And what you do with the fingertip feel, or at least me in the church, is you're kind of keeping a pulse on what is happening. You know, as a male and the pastor, I am a de facto member of the United Women of Faith. I don't intend all the United of Women faith meetings, but the fingertip feel is sometimes it's prudent to pop in, hey, how's things going?

Coffee good, tea good, everyone's happy, good. And you kind of know, like, if that buzz is a healthy place, all right, then you go on to the next place and check in. And that fingertip feel is just about keeping a pulse on the church and knowing where you can do the most good, where you need to be to see how things are going. We joke with the firefighters about commander's intent.

And when we say commander's intent, do we mean the boss explaining exactly what he wants to have happen and exactly how he thinks this thing's going to play out? Or are we talking about a boss that's sitting in a tent, banging on a keyboard for 16 hours a day? And if you spend 16 hours a day sitting in your office, banging on a plastic box, do you really understand what's going on in your organization?

You know, and the answer to that is probably no. So I really encourage people to get the heck out of their office and go walk around and talk to people. Go figure out what's going on. I've heard that referred to as leadership by walking around. Yes, yes. There's a great book called In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters. And he talks about the concept of, he calls it MBWA, management by wandering around. But you, as a, talking about leadership by walking around, yes. Yeah.

I mean, part of what happens on this particular battlefield is that a commander of the Union forces, Meade, is new in command. He has only been in command a couple of days. Did that have any implications on Truss, or was it the fact that he had been a successful divisional, or I guess he was a corps commander, but a corps commander, did that have any bearing on the way things worked out in the battle?

Well, I think George Meade, he's been on the job three days, you know, no pressure, just the fate of the union. You've just come up against Robert E. Lee. No one's ever beaten before, but no pressure. So when Meade comes in, he understands the magnitude of the task and he's. Meade has a very good reputation. He has been a very successful brigade commander, division commander, corps commander. He has led all the way up through the chain of command. But he's very serious. He's very stern.

He doesn't get invited to the barbecue. I mean, he's not a high-five, back-slapping, smiling kind of guy.

He's just all business. so he's not real inspirational but he's good and he's good at what he does i mean everybody talks about how general lee loses the battle of gettysburg nobody ever talks about how mead wins the battle of gettysburg and there's lots of things that general mead does to win that battle you know and and the biggest thing he does is he never spends any time in the headquarters he's constantly on the on the march he's on the road he's

riding around he's talking he's going face to face with his subordinates he's looking at the situation and when he first gets to Gettysburg it's like 11 o'clock at night on July 1st the first thing he does is he meets with his generals and then he grabs a young captain and a couple other officers and they ride the fish in the moonlight and they make a map and they sketch a map of the ground so that's that fingertip feel that jeremiah was talking about you've

got to get out there you've got to go talk to your folks you've got to go look at what's going on and i think that's where the trust comes in because if i just say it's not my responsibility to show up to united women of faith meetings. But when they see you there from time to time i think you build trust a little bit of time You know, if I'm in the building in an evening, I'll pop into the music ministry rehearsals just for the same thing, just to say, hey, guys, I'm here.

And I think that helps towards the trust. About explaining why, Bryson or Jeremiah, you want to talk about the importance of explaining why, why we're doing this, why we're doing the mission? Yeah. Well, I could bounce on that, but Bryson, do you want to say anything? Well, you know, I mean, why goes a long ways. We talked a lot about this, is that you can give commands or orders and say, you know, you people need to do this.

But when you have, if people trust you, and then it's easier, you may not necessarily have to communicate the why so strongly, right?

I mean, people want to know why they're given a menial task. But when you have that trust, you know, I think people come back and say, well, if the pastor's asking me to do this, it must be kind of important. Knowing that larger why, it's a unifying factor really in an organization, whether it's a church or an 1863 infantry regiment.

So knowing the why of what we're doing there, what we're supposed to accomplish, why we're there in the first place, that's kind of just like this chain of invisible organization that gets people united around a common purpose. And so connecting in with some of the other stuff we've said, if you bring in trust to the equation and there's a clear why that's been established, people will be ready to charge forward into a rough situation because they know that's what's going to accomplish the why.

Well, you made a comment about it, Rob, earlier. You talked about the commander's intent. To me, there's this real strong relationship between the why and the commander's intent. If you can understand why you're doing something, you have a good running start towards having an appreciation for the commander's intent. There's plenty of examples at Gettysburg where things go wrong for one side or the other because people haven't explained why.

And in my opinion, there's about three reasons why people don't explain why. I mean, one is they're arrogant and they don't think they need to explain why. And that's just bad leadership. They're lazy and they just don't want to put the effort into explaining why. And that's bad leadership. But most often the reason people don't explain why is because they don't know why they're just executing orders and they don't know why they're doing it.

They're just, they've been told to do it and they're just doing it and they're passing that along to their people. And if that's the case, they need to go back and have a long conversation with their boss and say, Hey boss, you need to explain to me why we're doing it like this. Cause I need to explain it to my people. And you know, unfortunately leadership is all about having hard conversations and being and willing to have the hard conversations for the benefit of your people.

Hey, Dennis. I was just going to say, you know, one of the ways this has played out in the ministry setting is that we've recently shifted from the traditional four-board administrative model to what they call a simplified accountability structure or a single board. And we've done the hard work that this first year has been absolutely nothing but explaining and exploring vision and mission of basically why is this church standing here?

Because if it's hospitality hour, okay, that's cool, but it's a lot harder to grow and bring people in if it's just because we have good coffee. And so I've had folks this year saying, all right, well, when do we quit doing vision statements and wordsmithing and just get on with the task? But we spent a lot of time with expressing that why.

And now that we're a year out, we're actually growing the church our mission has shaped it's shifted a little bit to where we're putting our efforts and i think that's creating a natural energy within the truck within the church that then folks are kind of i guess maybe trusting me saying hey something is happening here yeah so that's that's a real world experience it's it i'm gonna come back to you second second bryce i i personally like the the new leadership

model i will say it asks everybody to become an expert in human relations and in the building and in evangelism and in worship. So it does have its challenges with that as well. I'm sorry, Bryson, you were going to say something. Since we're talking about why, I was just going to bring up an example of how this has applied in my own ministry. I mean, just one of the things that came straight out of the battle that I have applied almost every day since.

This notion of why and not telling your subordinates about it, that was something I realized I was very bad at doing. I was not sharing necessarily why with my leaders or my congregants. I just sort of assumed they knew what we were all doing.

And it was interesting because there was one of the vignette little episodes we stopped and talked about at the battle was a guy, I believe it was Humphreys, Rob, Andrew Humphreys, who's the stereotypical quote-unquote crusty army regular and i mean this guy who's experienced he knows what he's doing but he's not easily approachable he's kind of a prickly character and people don't relate to him very well and as we were sitting

there at this spot on the battlefield talking about how humphreys was leading and how this crusty character was effective we got into a conversation about how leaders who aren't necessarily just people persons can be effective in sharing their why. And Rob said, well, if you're going to be a crusty kind of a leader, you need to be absolutely clear why you are doing things with your people.

So that way, when the time comes to act or something happens and they see the value in what you told them, they'll trust you more. So that was just one of those kind of battlefield instances that spoke to me and have really kind of shaped what I've done since. We explain why we decentralize and empower our people. So when the windows of opportunity open out there, our people feel comfortable taking advantage of them.

They don't have to wait to get permission from seven levels up the chain of command. I mean, do you want an authoritarian organization where nobody does anything unless they're told to, or do you want a fluid, a flexible organization that's going to embrace a little bit of chaos and take advantage of changing situations? Well, I'm not the expert on Gettysburg. You are, Rob. But I mean, Sears's book on Gettysburg talks about how the fact that Vincent

encounters somebody. He's a colonel, I think. He's a brigade colonel, brigade commander. And he encounters somebody in the battlefield. And he gets an assessment situation. He says, go tell Meade I'm going to do X, Y, Z. Why? Why does he do that? Because he understands what Meade's strategy is. He knows the why of what Meade is doing. so he can anticipate and save 20, 30, 40 minutes at a very critical time in the battle. He's getting himself ready for what needs to happen.

Anticipation drives preparation. If we can think about what's going to happen next, we can be prepared for it. Yeah. And he was able to do that because he knew why. He knew what was going on. And I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek. And I'll put a link to his TED talk in the show notes. And I've also read his, I shouldn't say most recent, certainly a more recent one about the Marines, where I think the title of it is Leaders Eat Last. Correct.

That's correct. And I think going back to the issue, I mean, part of what we were driving at here was trust. In the Army, which my background is, in the field, Army leaders eat last. You eat last because everybody else needs to be taken care of before you can take care of yourself. You take care of your troops first, then you take care of yourself.

And it becomes because if they run out of food who's the person in the position to make sure that doesn't happen again you that's that's going to be you so it's in your best interest to make sure they have enough yeah yeah and and i and i better go back to the issue part of how you build trust and i think jeremiah or bryson implied it earlier part of how you build trust is by taking care of your people, going out.

And what I discovered at Hilltop in Salt Lake City, Utah, when I got there, it wasn't that I did everything that the people wanted me to do. I mean, I went there in part because they had a leadership crisis going on. And so I was asked to go there because of this leadership crisis. I didn't listen to everything everybody did and implement what they recommended, but I at least listened. And the listening helped build the trust you were talking about.

Two different types of listening, listening to respond and listening to understand, right? Right. And the listening to understand is what you were doing, and that's much harder. It is. What's the great quote? Too often we listen in order to reply rather than to understand. And God gives us two ears because we're supposed to spend twice as much time listening as we do talking. I heard that the first time when I was about 18 years old from an Army sergeant. Yeah.

Jeremiah, Bryson? I was just going to add, we mentioned briefly at the beginning, part of trust is clear communication. And as Rob mentioned about these staff rides is that it's about people and it's about how we communicate. In the typical continuing education options for our clergy profession, we have a lot of options to understand ourselves, whether we're looking at personal inventory tools like Myers-Briggs or DISC personality profiles.

And we spend a lot of time talking about, you know, I'm an INFP. But what we don't do is how does that play out when we communicate with other people? And then furthermore, in times of crisis, you know, one of the things that Rob had mentioned is when we did the first staff ride, the United Methodist Church was going through schism. And so we had the crisis of... Division in the organization. And then we had COVID pandemic.

And how do you deal with people when everybody's at a higher level anxiety that's just all the more pertinent in communicating? One of the lessons that I learned, and I apply every day, and I have to do it in the case-by-case scenario in my context of the church, is that knowing how I can communicate an order or a wish or a command to different people. I have one staff member that I can make a suggestion and he will bend over backwards and way exceed.

On the other side, I've got a staff member that unless I say, you need to do this, it just doesn't get done. And the little vignette there was talking about some of the challenges of the Confederacy with General Lee giving orders, saying, if practical, do X. And sometimes if practical was the out that never got done. And so I think communication is a big thing. And that was something that I learned on this staff ride.

You can't use the same leadership style with every support in it or a peer for that matter. I mean, you've got to modify the leadership style for the support. It's lazy to think that one size fits all. You're not going to get the most to other people. And the dilemma, Rob, is that people who have no military background don't understand what you just said.

They have this perception from too many movies or something where if you're in command, you can lead as if one size fits all, as everybody will conform to what you had to say. That's just not reality. The reality is much like we have in the local church. You have people with gifts and graces, and they have different gifts and graces. You have to talk to them in a different way, in a persuasive way. How you go about that is different from person A to person B to person C.

So, Bryce is nodding his head. Yeah, communication is most definitely the key to trust. And one of the difficulties I think I face in my ministry is just realizing that I communicate on a different level than so many other people in my church. I mean, I'm a millennial, so I'm very adept at technology, but the majority of my church is the silent generation or baby boomers. So this process of establishing trust really involves me talking in a way they will understand.

So literally calling them up on the phone or visiting with them in person. Yeah, it's communication is the key for sure. And learning how to do that makes you the best possible leader. And we talked about, we stood on a little round top and we talked at length about what do good leaders look like? What do good leaders sound like? How do good leaders act?

And, you know, think about the good leaders that you've had in your life, the teachers and parents and coaches and clergy and military officers. And what was it about them that made them a good leader? And we're talking about communications, the ability to communicate, the tone of the voice, the ability to project their voice without voice amplification. Talking about eye contact. We're talking about body language.

I mean, all the stuff that goes into it. and don't discount the value of a swan on your face because we've all had people that look angry all the time, even when they're not, but they're just looking. Ross is raising his hand. Well, sometimes people interpret you as being angry when you're just intense, but yeah.

Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I mean, to me, that what we've talked about is trust, relationship, communications, that communications and relationship are part and parcel to the formation of trust. And you don't go about establishing, today, from this moment forward, you're going to trust me. You have to build an environment where trust becomes the indicator that you're making the investment in other areas to build that trust.

One of the things that we do towards the end of a staff ride is we talk a lot about self-awareness and understanding how you are being perceived by other people and how do you do that. And one thing we talk about, I talk about is three things you do well and three things you don't do well, which we call them ups and downs. In the Marine Corps, this is very common. It's a very common tool for counseling is, hey, Marine, what do you think you do well?

What don't you do well? What are you going to do to address those things that you don't do well? When I first met Bryce and Jeremiah, that's how we opened the discussion. Before we even started talking about the battle, it was like, 820, tell me three things you do well. And then the next day, it was, tell me three things you don't do well. And then at the end of the second day, it was, what are you going to do to fix those things? Or, yeah, you don't have to fix them.

I mean, because sometimes we're such broken toys that it's so deeply embedded in our personality. Maybe we can't fix it, but we can try. We can work on it. We can give it a shot at an honest effort. You called it self-awareness. I mean, I've also heard it emotional intelligence, EQ.

And unfortunately sometimes we equate intelligence quotient iq and we make the assumption that somebody who's smart is also emotionally intelligent that's actually not true it's i've met some very very average people intellectually who are extremely aware of who they are and how they fit in with other people conversely my own experience has been Sometimes the smarter people are, the less emotional intelligence they have.

I don't disagree with that, but nobody's perfect. And we all have room for improvement, and we can all get better. And, I mean, if you, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, here's the challenge for us, is that I'm not sure I can make my IQ better, but I can certainly make my EQ better. And part of that is by paying attention to who I am and how it is I interact with other people. So I can build that.

And it's good to have a trusted agent in your life, someone who can cover your blind spots and tell you the truth, whether you want to hear the truth or not. I mean, somebody other than your spouse to do that. Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the largest church in Methodism. It's in Kansas City. And he makes that point. Exactly the point you just made is that you need to have somebody you can ask about how you're conducting leadership and how you're doing things,

and it needs to not be a person who you're married to. Yeah, exactly. Listen, Jeremiah. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think going back to, you know, there's the self-awareness that we get a lot as clergy, but we get very little on leadership training in a practical sense. And as Rob is touching on here, part of leadership is knowing that maybe I'm not the best administrative organizer in my institution, but I know a guy or I know a gal that can help me out with that.

And, you know, so sometimes the overall success of the win, it's not just on the shoulders of the pastor, but it's knowing who can help you with those blind spots. crushes. A lot of the value that I've taken in this notion is, I mean, Jeremiah is right. As clergy, we are given ample opportunities to understand who we are because, I mean, our profession involves knowing your spirit. Yet it's not doing a lot with how do you share that with other people?

How do you help other people and guide other people with that? And it's been really tricky, especially for me, because I'm a very kind of introverted person and I'm very, I understand myself to a very deep degree. But when it comes to other people, I've often felt like there's an invisible wall between me and other people because I just can't sense their feelings.

I can't sense where they're at. But the value of an approach like this, what we're talking about, is it's given me questions I can ask to start to chip away at that wall. It's given me mindsets to think of, like I can use where I'm at to picture where others might be and things of that nature. So, again, it's using that emotional intelligence in a way that really benefits your organization.

I was amused when we were talking about Mead, and he wasn't necessarily the guy that you would invite to a party. And I think of Paul in the New Testament that way. I just can't imagine Paul would be a lot of fun at a party. But he changed the nature of the world. I mean, certainly the Christian portion of the world and how it is that we understand the ministry of Jesus in the world. A lot of that was formed through the lens of Paul.

So you don't have to be the warmest, most gregarious guy in the whole world in order to be able to go back. Did he capture Jesus' intent? I think the answer, I believe, is yes. But at the end of the day, he wasn't somebody you invited to a barbecue to have a beer with. He was, as I said, somebody who got things done, accomplished things. And he did it in part by willing to examine his own self-awareness.

I mean, prior to the road to Damascus, he had one set of ideas, and he got knocked off his horse, metaphorically anyway, on the way. And he was a different person as a result of that. And I think all four of us have probably at some point in our time, in our lives, had a certain amount of hubris about something that we thought was really the right way to do something.

And we had our own personal road to Damascus experience and we got knocked off of our metaphorical horses and the outcome of that was a certain amount of humility. We had to, humility helped us a great deal with our own emotional intelligence, our own ability to communicate, understand the why, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, goes on and on and on. Am I making sense?

Yeah, Rob gave actually a good point on this, on one of the staff rides, talking about that self-importance when we're puffing ourselves up. And he said, your job is only as important as long as you have it. And that's a good reminder that... You know, what might be the hill that we're dying on today, the situation can really quickly change that it's not our problem anymore.

That was because a senior officer, I was being an idiot, and a senior officer told me, hey, lieutenant, your job is only important as long as you have it. And after you get fired, someone less capable is going to take your people downrange. So very carefully consider which hill you want to die on, you know.

We could go on for hours with this and i think what we'll what we hopefully will do we'll come back another day for another visit is there anything i didn't cover on this first session potentially first session that i probably ought to have covered i mean you did a good job at the beginning rob of resetting resetting the context about what staff ride and what is what it looked like how it all fit together and jeremiah bryson anything that that

you wanted to perhaps as a Visit one you wanted to maybe hear and or see that we didn't get to? Sounds good to me, Dennis. Not that I can think of. Rob? I have some closing comments. Absolutely. The last thing we do on a staff ride is called integration. There are three phases to a staff ride, preparation, conduct, and integration. And what integration is, is all the participants get together and the participants have to speak.

For several minutes about what is it that they learned? What was the aha thing that they learned that they didn't know? What are they going to do to make themselves a better leader going forward? I mean, they have to commit to this is one thing that I'm going to do to make myself a better leader going forward. And to me, that is the most important part of the step run.

Because if you go through this 16 hours on the battlefield and you don't commit to being better, you kind of wasting your company's time and money. And integration tends to be very, very powerful. Even when you have a room of 30 people or I have a room of 120 people and they all stand up for 30 seconds and say, this is what I'm going to do to make myself better. Because as a facilitator, I don't know what shots are going home. I don't know where I'm hitting the black on this.

And it's really interesting to get the participants comments because feedback is a gift. And we want to have honest feedback. And I think Jeremiah and Bryce did a great job with their integration commons. Now, they actually came back a second time. We did Gettysburg one day, and the next couple years later, they came back, and we did Harpers Ferry, and we talked about Civil War and civil rights.

And then we did the Battle of Antietam. Now, it's a different cast of characters, but it's kind of a little bit of the same leadership. But we were able to go to some second tier subjects, some deeper leadership subjects. And that was a lot of fun. I think it was a lot of fun for them. I think it was a lot of fun for me. You know, we even took off our shoes and walked on a pilgrimage. So, I mean, there was a spiritual connection in civil war to civil rights.

There you go. I was just talking to Brad yesterday about that. So but the one thing i was curious about was is any of this nonsense that i'm talking about actually helpful i mean, I don't know, does it translate into the clergy world? I think you guys believe it does. Absolutely. I know it does.

I think about these things all the time. I'll be working through a situation at my church, and then I'll hear this Robism pop into my mind. It's like, oh, yeah, this is playing out right now.

You know history for the sake history is kind of cool but the ability to use history to help refine our nation's leaders that is the real payoff that's what this is all about and that's i love doing it and i love working with folks like jeremiah bryson and dennis come on out anytime you like i mean if you're if you're remotely interested in this stuff, contact one of these three guys and we'll set it up I don't think I'm done seeing you two I think you'll be back out here,

Fredericksburg, Chantelville or something else well I was actually, I was going to try and be there with that group I just even though I'm retired I didn't have I didn't have time and so I'm going to next time we do it I'll try to make sure I have time but Dennis did join us for integration I did, no over an alcoholic over an adult beverage. Now it's done best. I've already got some questions popping up in my mind that I would love to hear how a battlefield speaks to.

So yeah, you'll see us again, Rob. I look forward to it. Rob, I want to say on behalf of those who listen to Mindful Leader, thank you very much for your time and contribution. I hope that we can arrange another one another day, have you come back and talk a little bit about something else. I mean, sometimes when I do these, I have an outline, and other times I don't. And this was one of those, I don't have an outline, and it worked out real well. It worked out real well.

So yeah, Jeremiah and Bryson, thank you very much for helping me find Rob, and thank you for your words of positive commentary about Mindful Leader. So if everybody is listening to Mindful Leader, just again, thank you very much. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't hesitate to share it and send it on to another leader at your church. It's not oriented around only clergy. It's oriented around both clergy and laity, so they could be finding it helpful.

And it's also not oriented around only Mountain Sky Conference, United Methodist Church. Hopefully this speaks to people without regard to denomination or location in the world. God's blessings to you, and thank you very much. Music.