Chris McAlister – Founder of SightShift | Keys to Impactful Leadership Across Generations

Frank Cottle [00:01:12]: Chris, hey, how are you today? Welcome to the Future Work podcast. Really excited to have you with us. Gosh. Author of eight bestsellers, counselor and advisor to the Fortune 100 and venture capital startups. I mean, the full bandwidth of people, all of the topic of leadership. And I’d like to ask you first and foremost if you can give us a universal definition of what a leader really is.

Chris McAlister [00:01:43]: I love it. Frank, glad to be here with you and love sharing and nerding out around the future of work as it pertains to leadership, especially what a leader really is. You think about leadership, there’s so many definitions for it. And at the core, for us, we’re thinking about it in terms like this. A leader is defined by what they leave. So, you know, how am I leaving? This atmosphere, this space, this job, this role, this responsibility, the height of leadership is to think beyond yourself. And we have a specific definition, the way that we define that a leader is someone who develops other leaders. And we have three characteristics underneath that to make it really tight, make it really clear for how to define it. But, you know, that’s the core and the essence of it. It’s too easy to think about leadership in terms of the energy you’re applying to the moment. And that’s a starting point, but it’s a terrible ending point. A leader has to think about, how does this end? How do I finish this? Whether it’s a small moment, a big moment, a lifetime career, everything in between.

Frank Cottle [00:02:48]: Well, how would you give me one or two good illustrations? Absolutely. And how they’ve accomplished that?

Chris McAlister [00:02:57]: Yeah. So one would be this. A leader learns how to make meaning for themselves and help others do the same. So we think about leadership in terms of, I’ve got to motivate you, I’ve got to provide extrinsic motivation. That’s, again, a great starting point, but a terrible ending point, because a leader thinks about what happens when I’m not around, what happens when I’m not there. So how does the team flourish? How does the culture go on to be all it can be? So an illustration, how do they do.

Frank Cottle [00:03:26]: Better when I’m not there?

Chris McAlister [00:03:28]: Bingo. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, few leaders have ever tasted an environment where the team is initiating on their own in better ways than that leader could. And we hear it all the time, you know, how rare that is. And so we’re looking for someone who knows how to learn to make their own meaning, produce their own motivation, and teach others to do the same. That’s one characteristic. There are a couple others, but this is the starting point, because if I’ve got to keep you motivated, well, then I’m not leading you. And here’s a great example. I end up managing you and nagging you. And when we think about the future of work, I like asking leaders this question, how many of you like managing people? And I’ll ask it to a large room of people. Raise your hands. Hands don’t go up. No, people don’t like to manage people because managing people is a lot like nagging your teenager to clean their bedroom. When are you going to clean your room? You can’t leave those dishes on the nightstand. This is a mess. What are you going to do? And what ends up happening in management is we have to try to provide this extrinsic motivation. We’re going to try to force something. We’re going to try to get them to behave. And at the end of the day, I understand at different levels of the organization, you have different ways you interact with people. We cannot be in the place that we’re exhausting ourselves that way. We have to. What we say is lead people and manage agreements. What are you agreeing to? What am I agreeing to? You’re going to have your room cleaned by Saturday at noon. Great. Then you’re going to get your phone for the week. Thinking of the teenager example, if your room isn’t cleaned by Saturday at noon, you don’t get your phone for the week.

Frank Cottle [00:05:19]: So that’s a classic carrot and stick though. I mean, that’s been around since the carrot and the stick. I mean, forever. Is that a leadership principle, or is that a management principle, or is that a form of threat?

Chris McAlister [00:05:37]: Ah, love it. I love the challenge. So here’s the idea. Let’s zoom out. Why would you interact with, we’re just using an example here. The child. Why would you interact with your child that way regarding their bedroom? Because the end in goal is not to get their bedroom clean. The end goal is we’re raising to release them out of this house. We’re not raising them to stay here. We’re raising them to release them into the world on their own, self directed adults. So all systems, all incentives, all cultural values need to be built with this intentionality of, we are raising leaders. And, yeah, they may stay in the organization and go up five levels, right? They may launch out and start their own company or go to that other company. There is a sense that we can’t be these controlling, insecure leaders, that I’ll love them if they stay and hate them if they leave. But we are doing what we’re doing with the end in mind. And the reality is, once you start getting these lower level agreements in place like you’re talking about, then you get to start putting these higher structures where it’s not carrot and stick. It is learning to find your own intrinsic motivation. I don’t have to have the phone agreement to clean my room because I want to live in a clean room. But sometimes you got to get them feeling.

Frank Cottle [00:06:59]: Your ultimate motivation is to teach somebody the value of the benefit of the value of what you’re attempting to teach.

Chris McAlister [00:07:09]: Bingo. Connect them to the bigger picture, which.

Frank Cottle [00:07:13]: I think that I know. In our own company, people ask me personally, and in our industry, people ask me personally, what do you aspire to? Because we built a lot of companies and we’ve had certain successes and such, and I always have a standard answer. That’s an absolute truth, is I just want to be the best student of my industry. That’s all I want to accomplish. And I think that I’ll tie that to Henry Ford, who, when he was about 80 years old, still chairman of the board, somebody said, aren’t you a little bit old for running the Ford Motor company? He said, well, you’re only old when you stop learning.

Chris McAlister [00:07:59 ]: I love that.

Frank Cottle [00:07:59 ]: So my desire is to, and maybe my form of leadership is to always be learning and always be a student and be willing to be a student. Not to think I know everything, but to be willing to be a student overall and to apply that knowledge or to share that knowledge with others. So to me, leadership, in my model at least, is the sharing of knowledge in a way, and I think that’s what it is. You’re teaching people to be an adult. That’s a shared knowledge structure. That’s pretty important. One of the things try and guide our own managers is it say, if you’re not training your supervisors to replace you, then you’ve met. You’re not doing your job. Number one, you’ll never get a raise yourself. If you can’t be. If you can’t, we don’t have somebody replace you. But overall, you need people to be able to do what you do better by applying their learned knowledge to your training, if you will. And the combination of those two things should elevate them to be better than you. You want, you want your kids to be better than you, right?

Chris McAlister [00:09:25]: That is exactly it.

Frank Cottle [00:09:26]: Not just to clean the room better than you did, because I can tell you probably never cleaned your room.

Chris McAlister [00:09:34 ]: But.

Frank Cottle [00:09:35]: Truthfully, everybody should aspire to have those around them, rise them up and float them up by being better rather than drag them along. I don’t know if that’s a part of leadership so much as an aspirational goal that we should all have together. And how much of leadership is aspirational goals?

Chris McAlister [00:10:03]: Yeah. Well, I think leadership begins with something that you’re bothered with, and you want it to be better in yourself, in others, in your team, in your organization. That’s why vision always outpaces the resources of what you have, because you see the time, energy and money, and you go, okay, how we’re going to get there. But, but, you know, this idea that, you know, a leader at the end of the day, just like you were saying, sam Walton would do that, he’d show up to his leadership team and say, okay, build the job, role and responsibility, elevate yourself, replace yourself, lead at this level, get skills improved, get yourself replaced, or you don’t have a job here, like exactly what you’re saying, which would require a curiosity, a tenacity, a perseverance, a hunger. You know, I had a thought right before this podcast, actually, and I feel very energetic and excited to be here, but I’ve had so much learning today. My head and heart feel full because I learn from people we serve, from my team, from doing, from failing, from winning, from all of it. I learned more from failing. And this notion of leadership that you’re bringing out, that, yeah, this curiosity, this hunger, and I’m super curious. This is my passion, curiosity about how leaders build other leaders. And the first mark, the first thing that they achieve is they teach them how to find meaning on their own. And it might be a simple system. Like, I’m going to get my phone for a week, and then it might be more elevated. Like, I enjoy the feeling of a clean room. I enjoy driving a car I’ve paid for. I enjoy my own place to stay. Right? And once leaders taste how competent, how capable, how much they can apply their willpower and their intuition and upgrade it to seeing their world transform, you get addicted to it. You get addicted to it.

Frank Cottle [00:12:02]: Should that evolution, that process, though, always require a reward? Can’t it be for the individual personal satisfaction of just having done a good job of something and recognizing it?

Chris McAlister [00:12:24]: Well, I think that, yeah, you’ve got a cultural crisis of the good job should be enough. But whether that’s the paycheck or the.

Frank Cottle [00:12:32 ]: Promotion, what can I say?

Chris McAlister [00:12:38]: But here’s the dangerous thing about that. If we stop short there, the question we like to ask people is this, are you leading for your validation or for impact? And at the entry level of awareness? Yeah, most leaders are leading for their own validation, for the attaboy. The job well done. And all of that is a great place to start. It’s just a terrible place to finish. Because what happens under moments of great pressure, under your greatest defining moments of your leadership, which is going to be in moments of wilderness and uncertainty, you will, without awareness, go into behavior that causes you to lead for validation rather than impact. And so what we’re trying to help people do, and that’s just this first skill, not even the other two yet, is learn how to make meaning for themselves. Apart from the atta boy, apart from the good job, that intrinsic motivation, that they are really driven by a healthy desire, and they’re having the impact, you know? And this is not like I’m perfectly altruistic and I’ve mastered this, but, like, even being here today, there is something I want from today. Of course, that would be weird if that weren’t the case. I hope more people hear our message. I hope we help some people. I hope we serve your audience well. But ultimately, like, I’m 51% or greater here to have an impact and let the overflow of whatever magic happens between us today be this impact. I’m intrinsically motivated like that. And that’s a state that is definable, measurable. We have a tool that measures it, that most people aren’t there, and we have three warning signs that we help people recognize when they’re starting to lead for validation.

Frank Cottle [00:14:27]: I think your validation versus impact is critical. Critical. And you mentioned a cultural issue, basically, and it might be generational. The culture is separated by generations that you’re referencing. Overall, that has a impact to my generation. I’m a boomer, obviously. Might be getting ahead in stability. Mostly stability. Okay. We grew out of world war two. So stability, family values, things of that nature were very important out growing out of that era. My parents grew out of the depression. Again, even more important, stability and world War two. So a lot of chaos in that. In those times where a Gen Z person or younger millennial today might be more concerned in their value structure with, we’ll say work life balance, as opposed to stability at getting ahead or having some things that are nice. They want experiences rather than things, let’s say, in many cases. So how do you rectify the leadership styles? In our company, we have people of my age. I’m 75, my next birthday, and we have.

Chris McAlister [00:16:02]: Happy birthday.

Frank Cottle [00:16:03]: Thank you. Not till May. Cinco de Mayo, baby. And we have people that are interns that haven’t yet finished college. And so we’ve got all the generational levels in between. And how do you rectify a single style of leadership amongst five different generations of the same team? I’m not talking about culture here, because that’s a whole different subject. I’m just talking about leadership. How do you rectify a single leadership style within that?

Chris McAlister [00:16:41]: I love the question. Here’s what’s so powerful about it. We can use this idea of, do you lead for validation or impact, and even just apply it to two generations. And we could do all five. We’ll just do boomers. If you get a room of millennials and boomers in the same room together, and the millennials are like, I don’t feel appreciated here. And the boomers are like, here’s your paycheck. That’s your appreciation. Right? So. So it’s a different value system.

Frank Cottle [00:17:08]: I just say, here’s the door. Get over it.

Chris McAlister [00:17:14]: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the problem is with some of the companies we work with that are hiring, you know, anywhere from 50 to a thousand people this year. Your candidate pool has people in it that are responding to a completely different value system. And we were working with smaller, privately held companies. Yeah, it’s a different deal. But even then, we want to help them wherever they are, hear what is being asked for, and not coddle them. Not coddle them. You could coddle a boomer with performance and achievement and keep them happy, just like you could coddle a millennial with a workplace environment that doesn’t challenge them enough to help them grow because it maintains such great life, work life balance. So the key that we’re looking for is how can they recognize the ways they want to be validated and shift into leading for impact, not just validation. So the boomers really built a work identity, and this is big, broad brush stereotyping.

Frank Cottle [00:18:16]: Absolutely. Around spray painting at this point.

Chris McAlister [00:18:20]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s a great, great way to say it. So the boomers built an identity around the work and the achievement and the stability, like you said, and millennials have said, we don’t want that work life. That’s not what we want. We want balance, but the negative there is, and both have positive and negatives. Boomers built their identity around work. Millennials, Gen Z. They don’t build their identity around work. I have three Gen Z workers in my house or in our household, I should say three daughters at 22, 20, and 19, this year’s ages. They don’t want an identity built around work. So what that creates for them is a value system that’s different, and they’re trying to construct an identity around everything which is part of their pain and confusion. Boomers have the pain and confusion of, hey, I gave you money. Why do you need to go to therapy, kid? I was. I gave you a shelter. And millennials are in this place of saying, well, who am I? And what is my identity? And is it my gender, my creed, my sexuality, and all of this? And it’s very much convoluted.

Frank Cottle [00:19:31]: I gotta say, though, boomers went through all that stuff. I was gonna say B’s, but stuff in the sixties.

Chris McAlister [00:19:39]: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Frank Cottle [00:19:41 ]: You know, we went through all that in the sixties. I swear, every generation thinks they invented peace and sex, and they didn’t. We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us, and ultimately, people are standing on our shoulders, you know, as we evolve and as we move on to wherever that might be. But I don’t. I was a freaking hippie surfer for running long hair. And, you know, so I understand the life issues, I think, is, you know, as much as anybody. But I also think that we’re talking about leadership here, that there’s a point in time when you have to take responsibility to support the infrastructure, whether it’s a work infrastructure, a social infrastructure. It doesn’t matter around you, because you can’t just have others give. You can’t just. You’ve got to do it yourself. You have to stand on your own. You absolutely have to stand on your own. And we’re talking social conversation here as opposed to a leadership one. I’m sorry to get us off track.

Chris McAlister [00:21:11 ]: No, no, I love this. I love this because to me, they fit. And I want to agree and challenge with what you’re saying. You do have to find this for yourself. But the social structure, the institution, and this is a leadership function should support that. Let me illustrate it this way. Yes, generations find their own way on this, but it is getting worse. And here’s the idea. If you take an adult, an 18 year old from 1880, pluck one out. 1880. Did you meet an adult? Yes. You’re meeting an adult, 2024, take an 18 year old out. Random sampling. Are you meeting an adult? Probably, yeah. Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:21:51]: So, wait, wait, wait. Probably not in rus or western culture, but in many other cultures. Yep. You are.

Chris McAlister [00:22:02 ]: Absolutely. In fact, the mental health suffering that’s off the charts in the first world does not show up in the third world at the same scale. Yeah, totally. So, so what this tells me, and this is our research and kind of where we live and we measure all this, that institutions throughout human history used to give you a shift between validation and impact. We call it an identity shift, so that you learn how to lead your life, you learn your purpose, you learn where you cooperate and in society and your role and all that. And we did stop doing that and replaced an identity shift with something that was invented. Adolescence put in the human race at 1880 or so. And now what we’ve done is we’ve created a construct that says this, find yourself and then become an adult, lead your life. Well, the problem is, just like you were saying about curiosity, we’re never done finding ourselves. It’s an endless journey in exploration. And what I’m trying to do, what our organization is trying to do, is help leaders understand. You want to learn how to shift from leading for validation to impact, so you can create a company, a family, an organization, an institution to lead lots of people through an identity shift. If we don’t do this, we are going to see the continued damage and harm happening. And it’s a failure of leadership that’s the ultimate, you know, calling, job, responsibility, passion, joy, wonderment. I feel that the failure of leadership that’s happened is systemic, especially in the first world. We’re disconnected, and we’re not a part of an identity shift anymore. And so we just start with this question, do you lead for validation or impact? And from there, we want to guide them down a path. But I do think. Yeah. Generations discover, like you were saying, peace and sex. But it is getting worse, and. And the stats are there for it. So it’s a big task.

Frank Cottle [00:24:20]: Well, it is, because I think when you look at, again, our overall topic is future work. Well, I’ll take a little story first about leadership and style as I grew up. I grew up as a very free spirit. And in my sophomore year of college, I decided I was in the midwest for a couple years, and I decided that I would go down to the Bahamas for spring break. And I liked it there. So I got a job and I stayed. I took my classes, independent study, and, you know, passed my classes, did find a thing, but I came back. It was a small private school and college, and they didn’t really like that. And so they canceled out my quarter and said, we don’t want you to come back. Okay. It was pretty rugged. That wasn’t nearly as bad as it was a very expensive private college. And I had to go home and explain this to my dad, you know, you thought I was there. Well, I was really down in the Bahamas working as a commercial, and, boy, did I have a great time. And I think. But I had explained that, you know, this and that, and his leadership style is very much a quiet style. And he just looked very carefully and he said, well, you learn anything? And I. My reply was simple. I said, yeah, decisions have consequences, and I expect it get hit about. Then naturally, he just looked at me and said, well, never forget it. And he walked away. Okay. That was the most important leadership lesson of carrot and stick that I could imagine. And I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve never forgotten that the decisions have consequences. So to me, I’m rolling that little story back around leadership. It all comes down to teaching people how to make decisions. And part of that’s carrot and stick. Ultimately, all decisions you make are carrot and stick in some way or another. Hey, I’m going to go have lunch. What am I going to have for lunch? I’m going to have a big old pastrami sandwich, and you’re going to get chubby. Well, that’s a bad decision. No, it’s not once. It’s just a matter of day. So, you know, there’s all these balances that every decision you make, you know, has good and bad consequences to it. So as you look at the leadership, what we tell people in our company, we give them a little quickie speech when they come on board, it says the one thing we will fire you for, like, really fire you for. You this is it. If you are not capable of making your own decisions, you have to make decisions. If you don’t make decisions, you slow everybody down. Make a wrong decision, we can generally fix it, don’t worry about it. But if you make all your own decisions and you help other fake decisions, then everybody will move faster and everybody will be happier. So to me, leadership isn’t a top down, it’s a totally horizontal structure that you should have to where everybody is their own leader first and then contributes to the overall leadership of the organization from that flat platform. I don’t know what your thought is on that, but it’s very comfortable for us.

Chris McAlister [00:27:54 ]: Yeah, well, there’s a part that I want to affirm and then there’s a part that I might expand to. The part that I would want to affirm is setting a standard at such a mature place of the fireable offense is not making your own decisions. That’s a powerful way to set a very mature standard. And what’s happening for a lot of leaders in a lot of leadership atmospheres is they just don’t have a high enough mature standard. Now I would want to get in there and work with them on, okay, when you make your worst decisions, notice this, you’re making a decision for your validation more than impact. That’s what’s happening at that, at that level. I think on the horizontal organizational chart, you know, you’re always going to have this cycle come around of here’s the best way to do an.org chart. Here’s the best way to do an.org chart. And I think some of that is cyclical. Some of it is just semantics in the sense of the best metaphors occur in nature to me because nature can handle the military says we live in a vuca world, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. A nature metaphor is the only thing that’s strong enough to truly handle emergent systems. All the volatility and uncertainty that comes from the world we live in. So we think about it like a tree. And the root system is the LeadERShIP, the heart and soul of the organization. Because for sure the insecure behaviors of the leadership team has an outsized impact on the rest of the culture. And that’s just a reality check, if you will. So before you start at the fruit of the tree, the culture, or even try to look at the trunk, the substance of the organization, we start at the root level and we transform the leaders. Then it goes into the teams, then it goes into the culture. And if you do it that way, you’re not hierarchical in a negative way. In your organization, the Leaders get a vision. We’re here to serve the organization as they build this culture that serves our customers and clients. And that doesn’t feel like just semantics for us. We say it all the time, be the tree. Be the tree, baby. Because it’s, it’s a metaphor.

Frank Cottle [00:30:11 ]: Well, it’s funny because I come from an all farming and ranching family, so I understand trees.

Chris McAlister [00:30:18 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:30:19]: And the importance of feeding the roots, the importance of maintaining and trimming the trees and properly caring for that growing organism if you’re going to have good fruit, if you’re going to have a good yield. There’s outside sources, though. There’s outside things. Disease can hit a tree and outside disease, fire can hit a tree. There’s always outside influences that are out beyond your control. Trees, hey, global warming, what are the trees going to do? So there’s these outside forces. And how does leadership, how does that tree, so to speak, respond to those outside issues, especially as we go back to the generational thing. What’s a ten year old going to work philosophy? The ten year old today, what’s your work philosophy going to be? Okay, how is that going to, you know, dealt to? How do you take our leadership model and make us competitive on a global basis? By us, I’ll be very nationalistic, say the United States, our culture here today, our thought processes, our leadership models. How do you sustain competitiveness on a global basis with this five or six generational model to where, you know, I’m more concerned with lifestyle than I am with productivity, where the other company or country is more concerned with productivity than anything else because of their differences in culture.

Chris McAlister [00:32:15]: Yeah. Love it. There’s a timely part and there’s a timeless part. The timely part is you’re going to have leaders, you’re going to have AI prompters, and you’re going to have doers, and you’re wanting to figure out where you are in that. And part of it’s where you’re born, and then you have more to overcome or more advantages to you, depending on where you’re born. But what’s timeless is this. You always, there’s a lot of work around this and in different academic fields, but you kind of have four main responses to work. You have a person who kind of innovates, a person who takes that idea and synthesizes it, a person who can codify and organize it, and a person who does it. And when America was at the height of its productivity, we’ll just use 1940s, 1960s coming out of the Great Depression, before the seventies, you had organizational structures, while not politically correct, with a few leaders. Who are these innovators, synthesizers, codifiers, and.

Frank Cottle [00:33:25]: Lots of doers, you could have the tech industry today. Why go back?

Chris McAlister [00:33:31]: Bingo. Bingo. But like, even using this example, because I like using it in the sense that it’s a little, it’s a little bit of a hot button issue. You had a thousand secretaries, you had 100 leaders, and you had ten leaders of leaders. Let’s say the distribution of work was incredible. Now in a large organization now, and I don’t want to go back to that and any of that misogyny. I want to progress our values and conserve the human wisdom. We fought for this point. When you look at a modern organization, some of the large organization we work with, you have massively overqualified, underutilized, overworked people that are basically shuffling PowerPoint decks and email all day long in bureaucratic structures. That is going to hurt us as a nation competitively. I look for nimble organizations to have massive impact with AI to replace. What was that like? Secretarial work pool. The doer part of the organization that’s going to help innovators, they’re still going to innovate, synthesize. The improvers are going to, the way these ideas flow together and the teams that come up with that, they’re going to still do awesome. And they might be in India and they might be in America, because AI will.

Frank Cottle [00:34:59]: But technology is erasing borders, or we are erasing borders for the workforces, and we’re very remote work and virtual office thing as a company. And so we see that every second of every day going on. There’s no question about that. As it evolves.

Chris McAlister [00:35:24]: We’e able to. Oh, go ahead, sorry.

Frank Cottle [00:35:26 ]: No, please.

Chris McAlister [00:35:27 ]: I would say we’re able to serve organizations literally continually because we have somebody who’s, so to speak, working around the clock in different time zones at a level of competitiveness that I would never want to pay an american to do.

Frank Cottle [00:35:45]: Well, you know what I find, and we do the same thing. What I find we do a lot of near shoring into Latin America is that the values and work ethic is just superior.

Chris McAlister [00:36:01]: Think about this.

Frank Cottle [00:36:03 ]: It just do it. And one of the things I had, I kind of think about my own family and such, but I also think about several of the people I work with. And one of the young fellows that was in a sales management position, he never used to refer to it as his job. He referred to it as his craft. He saw himself as a craftsman, almost as a. As an artist. And he found joy. It was not. The concept of work was anathema to him. This was not work. This was joy of practicing his craft overall. And he felt he had a bit of artistry going on there, and he did. He’s very good at it. Very good at it overall. And I wonder if the inspiration of recognizing that what you do isn’t really work. If you can see it as crafts, as a craftsman, as a. As someone that builds something of beauty and builds something of lasting value, then if a lot of the angst and the work life value and all those things start to go away, and if we can just reinstill that concept in people or help them to instill it in themselves, I think that’s more of it, is that comes from that teaching experience in youth of the value of having a clean room rather than the punishment of not cleaning your room.

Chris McAlister [00:37:47 ]: Right on. Right on. Well, the way I think about this is you don’t have to be an artist to live this way. We see people like this with a spreadsheet. Here is the definition.

Frank Cottle [00:37:59 ]: There’s art to being really great with spreadsheets.

Chris McAlister [00:38:02 ]: Bingo. That’s it. The definition is this. There’s a tight alignment. Oh, I’m sorry. Did I interrupt you?

Frank Cottle [00:38:09]: I was gonna say, we have some folks, and I’m sure you do, too, that they can do stuff with data and spreadsheets that I never would have imagined. And it is a craft. It’s beyond making the program work.

Chris McAlister [00:38:24 ]: Absolutely, absolutely.

Frank Cottle [00:38:26 ]: And I really think that as we approach leadership, that teaching or sharing how to create that experience and that approach is a big part of it, work. We shouldn’t just teach people their jobs. We do have to teach people the value of what they’re doing and how their life.

Chris McAlister [00:38:50 ]: I love that. And the way we would define that is it’s a tight alignment between being and doing. You know, who you are. It overflows into what you do. And you. You don’t have all these issues with resentment and bitterness and work life balance and dread and anger. You sacrifice for the vision. You stay calm in the problems, and you stay caring even when you’re challenged. It could become bitter. Now, not that we do that perfect, but that alignment between being and doing. Here’s what’s crazy. The research has shown it. There’s, like three or four major voices that have found this. Only about 3% of adults get there. And, you know, Da Vinci had the guts to wake up and go, I’m going to invent my own job. And there was somebody else that said, not me, I can’t do that, and would have felt shame. So I think if we could encourage people about the future of work, people listening, some things aren’t going to change. There’s always going to be people who, their own internal condemnations and struggles and shame, they would feel, aren’t going to feel the permission to explore and experiment their way into that alignment between being and doing. But if people are listening to this and they think, man, that could be me, it’s possible. It’s possible, and it’s not perfect. There’s some things I do on a given day that I’m like, I’m doing this because of the future I want to get to, but there’s a whole lot of joy and alignment also.

Frank Cottle [00:40:19 ]: Yeah, no, I think that’s absolutely right. And I think it’s application as we look towards the future and the future of work, which is the future of life, really. That’s a good. A good roundup. That’s a good way to place to finish.

Chris McAlister [00:40:36]: Sounds good to me.

Frank Cottle [00:40:37 ]: Full of hope, that’s full of opportunity, and it’s full of vision.

Chris McAlister [00:40:42]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:40:43 ]: So let’s call it Chris.

Chris McAlister [00:40:46 ]: Let’s do it.

Frank Cottle [00:40:47]: You’ve been great. I really appreciate your time today. If people wanted to reach you and learn more about Sight Shift, how could they do so?

Chris McAlister [00:40:56]: Can we cuss on this podcast?

Frank Cottle [00:40:58 ]: Oh, yeah. This is your moment of pitching well.

Chris McAlister [00:41:03]: So it’s fun to give this URL, figure that shitout.com would take them to the main place to go to, and then they can self select as an individual or as a company. And yeah, for us, this is our passion, what we’ve talked about here today. We have a process that in 4 hours a month or less, we instill into an organization to build leaders who build leaders.

Frank Cottle [00:41:25]: Well, I know you’ve been hugely successful and followed globally. So if it’s figuring shit out is what you got to do, then that’s.

Chris McAlister [00:41:33]: What you got to do.

Frank Cottle [00:41:35]: Here in Texas, we’d say that with about nine syllables, but that’s okay. Chris, thank you again. We’re really grateful to you and look forward to the next time.

Chris McAlister [00:41:45]: Thank you, Frank.