The cavnessHR Podcast - a talk with Dennis Brouwer

The cavnessHR Podcast can be found at the following places:

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cavnesshr-podcast/id1289104534

Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cavnesshr/the-cavnesshr-podcast?refid=stpr

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-119338849/the-cavnesshr-podcast-11

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qltHkRDQQYs&t=254s

Social Media links for Dennis Brouwer and free resources below!!
Email: Dennis@DLBrouwer
TW: @DLBrouwer
FB: TheReturnonLeadership page
LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlbrouwer
Free resources below!!
The link for info on the book is www.returnonleadership.info.  
Anyone who buys the book and emails their receipt to ReturnOnLeadership@gmail.com with the cavnessHR podcast in the subject line will receive bonus materials including a study guide, work sheets, additional stories that didn’t quite make it into the book and a photo gallery.

Jason: 0:01 Hello, and welcome, to the cavnessHR Podcast. I’m your host, Jason Cavness. Our guest today is Dennis Brouwer. Dennis, are you ready to be great today?

Dennis: 0:10 I am!

Jason: 0:13 Dennis Brouwer is author of The Return on Leadership book that defines and quantifies the impact of the leader on growth and people, teams and markets. In The Return on Leadership, he combines his hands-on experience as a frontline leader with the curiosity of a social scientist and communicates it all in the writing style he learned as a city editor of a small-town newspaper. He’s led the turnaround of a global cloud services business, co-founded a software company, and flown U.S. Navy jets looking for Soviet submarines at the height of the Cold War. He holds a certificate in leadership coaching from Georgetown University and lives with his wife, Rebecca, on a small farm in Northern Virginia and he rides a motorcycle, just to keep it exciting. Dennis, I see you have a very exciting life so far. You have done a lot of things that most people haven’t done yet. That’s really good.

Dennis: 1:05 It’s been interesting so far. I look back on it and people ask about my background and I think I can say with a quite a bit of confidence that it’s unique; no doubt about that.

Jason: 1:19 So, talk to us about your book. Is this the first book that you’ve written, or are you’ve written other books in the past?

Dennis: 1:24 No, this is the first book I’ve written. It just actually became available to purchase last Tuesday, September 12th, so it’s all very new and fresh. People ask how long it took to write it and I guess the answer to that is 12 years. I’ve got notes that go back that far; I’ve abandoned it a number of times along the way [and] finally got serious about it last July and the way events came together, I had enough time to actually focus on it and get it done. So, it’s all very fresh and very exciting.

Jason: 1:58 So, Dennis, what motivated you to finally finish the book?

Dennis: 2:02 The motivation I had all along was really the same, at a high level. My experience in business was that, when you talk to senior leaders in almost any organization and ask them about growth, they tend to say two things. One is, “the organization isn’t growing as fast as I think it should be” and the second thing is, they’re not really sure why. So, I always wondered about that. I’ve had experiences with companies I’ve worked for, working for different leaders, where some places were very successful, and other companies in the same business sector weren’t successful at all. So, that was a consistent thing for me.

Dennis: What finally came together was, in 2016, I ended up accepting a position that required a very, very long daily commute. So, I was spending in the neighborhood of 20 hours a week commuting and it was either do something creative, or go crazy. And I thought, “you know what? Maybe this is the time to finally finish that book. So, my trusty Macintosh and I did 800 words on the way in and 800 words on the way home and, in about 6 months. I had a draft and once you have a draft, then it’s just the editing process. So, that’s what really got it going.

Jason: 3:12 Did you publish the book yourself, or did you use one of those publishing companies to publish it for you?

Dennis: 3:16 I used what’s known as a hybrid publisher – it’s a company called Fast Pencil. So in one extreme, you’ve got to completely do it yourself; you can go to Amazon, or anybody else, and just upload that file and you’re completely on your own. And on the other hand, you’ve got the traditional – I guess you could refer to New York, big publishers – where, supposedly, they take care of everything. Fast Pencil does it kind of in-between. So, I got assistance from them on things like editing and over design and marketing and that sort of thing. But then I also have a great deal of involvement in the marketing programs and essentially the content and final say on how the book is laid out. So, the hybrid model worked well for me; I’ve got a background in sales and marketing and actually being able to lay hands on the details of it just worked great.

Jason: 4:03 So, Dennis, obviously you want everyone to buy your book. But when you wrote it, who was your target audience in the book?

Dennis: 4:09 My target audience is really the mid-level to senior level leader in an organization. I would have initially said “in businesses” but over the last 3 years, I’ve coached people in associations and non-profits, and that sort of thing. I’m finding that the issues are all the same. So, that mid- to senior manager who’s got at least 3 years of leadership experience. But what I’m finding now is that people I’m talking with [who] want to get into leadership, and this is actually a kind of a nice primer to go through before you step into that first leadership role as well.
Jason: 4:44 So, I’ve heard a lot of people say that the mid-level managers don’t get enough as far as professional development from their companies. Do you agree with that statement?

Dennis: 4:52 I would agree wholeheartedly with that statement. One of the analogies I’ve used recently is: about 4 years ago, I stepped out of frontline leadership for the first time in my adult life and I’ve had the luxury of devoting my time to the study of leadership and after about 8 months of being just immersed in the science of leadership. Which is a science I didn’t even know existed. I realized just how ignorant I was about the actual science of what works and what doesn’t and why it works. I was no different than all the other people that I worked with. You get a week or two here or there, probably not more than 4 – 6 weeks, through a 30-year career. And if you think about it as your profession, that’s not really much time spent on professional education.

Jason: 5:41 So, I was in the Army for 25 years and in my experience, some leaders are good leaders for some people, but not so good for others and a select few are good leaders for everyone. So, why do you think that is?

Dennis: 5:51 Well, that’s really the question at the center of the book, in the center of the inquiry I had about leadership. One of the things that I’ve discovered is when I went through Georgetown, there was an area of research called Adult Stage Theory. It really explains that the theory of adult development used to be that you become an adult, and then you become middle-aged, and then you become elderly – and that’s just how it works. But that’s really a view of your physical and mental age and, for the leader, that’s only one small aspect of it. What’s actually much more important is the perspective of the leader, and that’s how they view the world around them and their ability to have an impact on it. So, as people read the book, they’ll find a really important distinction between reactive leaders and creative leaders. Reactive leaders can be successful in very detail-oriented, very short term-focused environments – that’s just where they shine.

Dennis: Creative leaders tend to have longer timelines, have more inclusive approaches to their teams and a more introspective style around making sure their assumptions were valid, that everyone’s being heard, and that you’re really doing the work to grind the best ideas out of all the input that you can get. So, if you find creative leaders, they tend to be successful in any kind of environment and that’s really one of the proof-points in the book. I flew with a guy 30 years ago (he was my Navy pilot) – we parted company after spending 5 years together in the cockpit – he stayed in the Navy for 26 years. I went into corporate America at IBM and CompuServe and CenturyLink and companies like that, and after we got back together after 25 years, we started to compare notes and all the challenges that we saw – all the people-stuff – was all the same.

Dennis: We actually had an assessment done of difficult turnarounds that that were important parts of our career. For me, it was the turnaround of a company called Savvis. Where I ran a global business unit component of the company. For J.P. Kelley, my Navy pilot, it was his turnaround of a Navy training squadron. You think those are really, really different environments. But the principles are all the same and when we were assessed using the Leadership Circle Profile, which is a quantitatively-enabled assessment tool. We came out with virtually identical profiles. So, [we] both came out as creative leaders, both in highly diverse environments using exactly the same techniques, just wearing a different uniform, really.

Jason: 8:39 So, Dennis, why do you think some companies, whether they’re large, small, corporate, are better abled at developing leaders than other companies are?
Dennis: 8:49 I think there’s a little bit of luck involved because we don’t do a good job as a culture of evaluating leaders, before they’re hired. On their ability to lead; we’ll maybe hire them on their ability to learn, or to manage, their attention to detail, things like that. But not on their ability to really motivate and to help people understand their role in achieving their vision. So, I think some of it is luck. I think probably the bigger component, the larger component, is culture.

Dennis: I’ve worked with a gentleman who, today, is the executive chairman of a publicly held multi-billion-dollar company that was, when he took over 15 years ago, literally within 11 hours of bankruptcy. They’ve saved it on the brink, built it back from there. But what they’ve done along the way is they’ve really cultivated this culture where there’s open discussions – if you’ve got an issue, you bring it up and if somebody brings something up, you listen to it, you’ve tried to find the truth that’s in there. It’s not just a meritocracy where the best ideas rise to the top. It’s really something that’s built around respect for others’ opinions which means listening to them. But it also means allowing them to challenge you and challenging those ideas as well. So, that ability to really engage in that sort of active debate and driving it to specific items, that component of culture, is just really, really essential.

Jason: 10:27 So, on another subject, what type of motorcycle do you have and how long have you been riding?

Dennis: 10:32 Well, I had a motorcycle when I was a kid (a teenager) for a couple of years and managed to survive that. I had my second motorcycle when I was a Navy lieutenant in San Diego and managed to survive that. I now have a Yamaha 1300 Road Star that I’ve had for about a year at this point and I live in an area (if you look it up online, you’ll see “Washington, D.C.” but we actually live about 55 miles west of Washington, D.C.) and it’s really hills and horse country and the Blue Ridge is 10 miles right outside that window, so it’s a nice place to ride motorcycles out here.

Jason: 11:11 Dennis, can you talk about a time you were successful in the past, what you learned from the success, and what we can learn from your success?

Dennis: 11:18 Well, I think probably the best example, the most relevant one, for listeners of the podcast is actually what’s in Chapter 6 in my book. The chapter’s entitled “Putting Out the Grease Fire” The story behind that title is that I was hired to run product management for the network business component of a global I.T. services company. After a few months, there was an executive shake-up and I ended up in charge of this thing, and it was a complete mess – revenue was declining at 8% per year, [it] had declined 35 million dollars on a 300 million-dollar base the year before; no profitability. Customers are leaving as fast as they can [and] as soon as quickly as they can get out their contracts. The joke became that it was like buying a house – you sign a contract, shake hands with the realtor and the realtor says, “Oh, by the way, there just one other thing – there’s a grease fire in the kitchen. So good luck with that.” But what happened was, it was a business that had gone through a lot of change, not very successful, really hit by the forces of globalization and new technology and it was in dire need of a turnaround.

Dennis: I kind of stepped right into the middle of it and I ended up taking over a team that was ready to go but just really needed that focus on, first of all, vision, which is making sure that we all scoped out a view of a future worth caring about, and then engagement, which is what’s everybody’s role in achieving that and then they can narrow it down into a plan for execution. So, over the next 2 years, we were able to turn that mess around, as they say, and it went from an 8% revenue decline to a 3% revenue growth; went from dramatically unprofitable to profitable and we began selling these services. There was a lot of work along the way.

Dennis: But I would say that the lessons that I got out of that were, first of all, it can be really difficult to sort of keep your cool through it all. The saying I used a lot during that time was, “things are rarely as good or as bad as they seem.” It seems like the place is burning down [but] actually, it’s not; we’ve got business problems, but if we focus, we can work our way through them. Then you’d have a win and you go, “man, it’s great. We made it through!” and this is like, well, actually, that was just one take in the right direction. We still have to stay focused and keep working on it. That really goes to the bottom-line message, which is, over and over and over again, vision, engagement, and execution, in that order. You’ve got to define a future, really understand that role in getting and accomplishing that, and then relentless execution on top of it. It’s like the old shampoo bottle that says, “rinse and repeat”; that’s what you have to keep doing over and over and over again.

Jason: 14:16 That is a big success. Dennis, next, talk about a time that you failed in the past, what you learned from this, and what we can learn from this.

Dennis: 14:24 Another great question. Probably the most poignant one, for me, as I consider the question, was my first contact with literary agents at the end of last year. Everybody wants their baby to be cute and intelligent, and the first literary agents looked at my book and said, “Yeah, if this is you baby, it’s kind of ugly and confused. So, there’s some good stuff in here, but there’s a lot of work to be done.” And what I really learned from that is, first of all, your first in one product is, in any case, not the end product. And if you think that, you’re kidding yourself, whether that’s software, enterprise software, or a book that you’ve written.

Dennis: But then the second thing is, that you’ve really got to set your pride and your easily-bruised ego aside and really listen to the feedback. Because the feedback that I got from those agents, those guys who have been in the business for a long time, really drove the ability of me to finish the book. I completely retarded in my book; I threw out about 40 % of it because it was confusing and changed the emphasis and laid the narrative out differently. So, the lesson there was, as painful as it was, to listen to that feedback, and not just listen to it but really embrace it, really look for the truth in it, and find ways to use it as a building block to leverage forward. And I’ve seen that happen, time and time again, and as I’ve said, is a very poignant one. It was a work that was only credited to me so I had to accept every bit of responsibility for the parts that were good and weren’t so good.

Jason: 16:15 You must be open to feedback. Most people don’t want feedback so that’s a very good effort. So, Dennis, you talked about this a little already, but expand on how to add value and help us solve problems.

Dennis: 16:29 That’s an interesting challenge because a lot of times what you encounter is, you interview people. I ran a sales force of about 35 people in 6 months. A lot of people, when you ask them, “what do you like to do and how you add value?” they’ll say, “well, I like to solve problems.” It’s like, yeah, that’s great, we do need firefighters in the world, there’s no doubt about that. But we also need people who are a going to step back and figure out and ask the question, “why we haven’t solved this yet?” So, what I really try to do to add value is, as problems crop up, first of all, back up and make sure I’ve got the big picture and as part of that, it’s important to ask, “what other information do I have to have?” and you’ll typically get all kinds of conflicting information.

Dennis: But I think that a step that a lot of people skip over is to challenge their own assumptions. It’s like, “I think I know what I want to do; I think I know how this all works”, but to really ask the question, “do I actually know that?” I think it was Mark Twain or a similar philosopher who said, “It’s not what you know or what you don’t know that matters, it’s what you think you know that isn’t so.” And there’s so many times there have been assumptions and things that have been repeated, like the old game of post office, and they sort of hardened into fact and get passed around and they affect decision-making; a lot of times it’s limiting behavior.

Dennis: So, we can’t do that because we tried it, that will never work because we can’t afford it; and in many cases, those assumptions aren’t true.What I really try to do is to drag those assumptions out and challenge those assumptions. Ultimately, what I like to do to be able to add value is again to get people to focus less on today’s problems and more on “where are we trying to take this place. What are we really here to do, what does that future look like?” and it’s for companies that are really, really deep into problem-solving. That’s a very wrenching conversion to make because there’s this sort of natural gravity around problem-solving.

Dennis: It’s rewarding, you get that adrenaline you get when you’re working with it. You get that serotonin rush when you’re done with it (the runner’s high). And to pull people out of that day to day and get them to look, even for an hour, at “hey, what’s this place going to be like in 3 years?” What do you want it to be like? Who are our customers going to be and how are we going to serve them? It’s really difficult, but what I have seen over and over again when organizations do that, [is] it creates such creative bursts of energy and ideas of new things that the company could be doing today to line themselves up for that future. So, again, I just try to get the big picture going, extend the time horizon out and lay out a path to a future worth caring about.

Jason: 19:21 I know in the army we used to have a saying: “It’s hard to plan for the future when we’re in a 6 inch knife-fight.” We used to say that all the time.

Dennis: 19:28 I’ve heard that saying – it’s a vivid one, and it’s true. Oftentimes it’s used as an excuse not to look at the future. It’s like, “hey, I’m in a knife-fight”, well, why are you in a knife-fight every day? C’mon, man, what’s wrong with your life?

Jason: 19:45 So, next, talk to us about somebody who’s helped you in the past and how they helped you.

Dennis: 19:50 I’ll throw two people out, and there’s a common thread here, one is my boss, when I ran the turnaround at Savvis, was a guy by the name of Bill Fathers. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-fathers-7776053 He is a former special-forces commando from the UK, also one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. He was one of the people who, kind of mid-career for me, really held my feet to the fire. He did it in an interesting way where there were certain things that he expected of me and he made that very clear. So, the clarity around those expectations was great. And the second thing was, and this is the part where he really did me a favor (didn’t feel like it at the time. But it eventually it became clear what a gift it was), when I committed to something he held me to it.

Dennis: So, even though there were times I thought, “well, he probably forgot about that commitment it’s really kind of overcome by events” – there was one time in particular where he took me aside and just up one side and down the other about commitments that I’d made. That I thought were water under the bridge, had been long forgotten, it’s just like they were not forgotten at all. They were held up as specific examples of my failings and it’s just like, “damn, you’re right, I really let that one drop.” And then the second person I would like to mention is my wife, Rebecca – I’ve dedicated this book to her as my partner in all things. It’s really true; I wrote probably 80% of this book from last July to this March and that meant that I was immersed in it. So, I ate, slept, breathed this and I had a full-time job, so I focused on that while I was there.

Dennis: But when I was commuting, when I was waking up in the middle of night, I was thinking about the book project and you know how it is as you’re working on something new and, sort of unbounded, you come up with a lot of ideas. You come up with maybe A connects to B or A connects to C, or maybe “if I flip this around, look at it a different way, that’ll make sense.” Well, Rebecca was the person who had to hear all those raw ideas and she’s the one who would challenge me on, typically, to clarity. It’s just like, “okay, I think I understand what you’re saying, and it sort of makes sense.

Dennis: But you’ve really got to work on the way you’re communicating; you’ve really got to drive towards clarity on that. Because it doesn’t just have to make sense in your head, it’s got to make sense in someone else’s head. So you got to find a better way to clean up that logic; come up with better analogies or metaphors; communicate it.” So, in both of those cases, it really came down to people holding me accountable to making sure that I’m keeping my commitments and then being really clear [in] driving it for great clarity around what I’m trying to achieve and what I’m trying to communicate.

Jason: 22:35 It seems like the bosses or the leaders that were hardest on you, those were the ones that you actually appreciate the most when it’s all said and done, isn’t it?

Dennis: 22:43 It really is. There were uncomfortable discussions I had, in every case, but those are the ones that I learned from. Funny thing is, I’ll go back to Adult Stage Theory, again, their variety of stages: there’s reactive and creative [which] are two of the primary stages, and that covers most of the population. But people always ask, “well, how can I move from one to the next?” The answer is, some of it happens with age and some of it happens with experience.

Dennis: But, if you want to move forward, find yourself over your head in a crisis and that’s when you will actually change your viewpoint, broaden your perspective, try to look at new things; when your back is against the wall is when you’re most creative. So, in those cases, where there’s a tough boss who pins you against the wall and says, “you promised me this and you delivered something less, what’s going on?” That’s sort of a gut-wrenching kind of micro-crisis (depending on how big the issue is, maybe it’s the full-time crisis – a real crisis). So, I think it’s the responsibility of the leader to drive that kind of accountability. I’ve tried to do it; I think we did a good job of it at Savvis. There are other places [where] I wish I’d done better at it but it’s a constant challenge to have that sort of honesty and clarity and [to] be working with people who will take it, not as an emotional attack, but as something that’s good for the business and ultimately, it’s good for you.

Jason: 24:11 I think there’s a saying that says something like, “if you’re in an uncomfortable situation, that means you’re growing” and you should be glad you’re in an uncomfortable situation. Because you’re actually getting better.

Dennis: 24:20 That has certainly been my experience, yeah.

Jason: 24:22 Dennis, next, tell us something about yourself that your close family might know, your close friends might know, but most people don’t know about you.
Dennis: 24:30 So, you asked how to pronounce my name earlier – Brouwer – B-R-O-U-W-E-R – and people ask, “what’s wrong with this spelling?” People don’t believe it the first two times I spell it. Sometimes, I think they think I don’t know how to spell my name because there’s this extraneous vowel in the middle (what’s up with that?). Well, it’s actually the Dutch spelling of the name of the word ‘Brewer’, so, if I were of English descent, I’d pronounce and spell my name ‘Brewer’ and there’s an A-U version of it for German. So, what that means is that I had an ancestor who was a member of the Dutch Brewing Guild in the 16th century; so that’s part of my lineage. The way that crops up today, in addition to a name that people get confused about, is that I actually brew beer.

Dennis: So, I started brewing beer about 10 years ago when it was a wild and exotic thing to do. It was before craft beer really took off and about six years ago. I got really serious about it and upgraded my equipment – went from plastic buckets to stainless steel stuff and improved my process. As an example, at the peak (about a year and a half ago) I brewed four different types of beer for an Oktoberfest that we put on and it’s really cool because, in some ways, I think it’s a metaphor for leadership.

Dennis: I think I can do this without stretching it too far because there’s a well-known process that you need to follow – your sanitation and for temperature control and for when you move it from this vessel to that vessel – and when you do it right, it improves everybody’s life; it feels good as the brewer, but it feels really good as the person who’s pouring a glass and enjoying this great there’s great homebrew. So it is something I really enjoy and I do wonder if it maybe isn’t because, a number of generations ago, there was somebody in my family who did it in a full-time profession.

Jason: 26:23 That’s a good story. So, Dennis, I understand that you have something for our listeners.

Free resources below!!

Dennis: 26:28 Yes, and this is a limited-time offer that has to do with the availability of my book, The Return on Leadership. So, let me really make sure I’m really clear about this because they’re about three steps. The first thing is, if for any of the listeners who go to any of the places that my book, The Return on Leadership is sold, that includes: Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million. If they go there and purchase it, that’s step number one.

Dennis: Step number two is to take the receipt from that (screenshot whatever it is) and email it to returnonleadership@gmail.com and include the name of your podcast in the subject line – just cavnessHR. If they include that in the subject line, they will automatically receive a bunch of bonus materials that go along with the book; so, planning worksheets that will help them map out relationships in the organization, that will help them envision a future and build a plan back from the future to today. A couple of additional C stories which are used to illuminate some of the principles along the way, and other bonus materials that are in there. So, again, if they go to Amazon, purchase the book, send the receipt to returnonleadership@gmail.com with cavnessHR in the subject line, we’ll send them those bonus materials immediately.

Jason: 27:59 Thank You, Dennis. Do you, have any social media links or any platform you’d like to provide to the listeners so they can reach out to you?

Dennis: 28:05 So, I’ve got Return on Leadership on Facebook – we have that page out there and we’ve got a growing population there. I’m also @DLBrouwer on Twitter and on LinkedIn, got good communities there. Ultimately what I really like that people do is to go to my website dlbrouwer.com and they can sign up for my blog. There I was speaking on leadership and that will keep them in the loop on anything new that’s going on; I blog at least weekly and publish it from there and then any other special offers that come along the way, that’s how I’d really like to communicate if somebody would like to communicate to me directly [at] dlbrouwer.com. They can always reach me there as well.

Jason: 28:49 Thank You, Dennis. And for our listeners, we’ll the links to everything in our show notes. Dennis, we’ve come to the end of our talk, is there any last words of advice or words of wisdom that you’d like to pass along to everyone?

Dennis: 28:59 Well, first of all, I’d just like to say thanks, Jason, for hosting me on this. I really appreciate it. Leadership is an exciting thing; it’s a challenging profession, it’s a profession I don’t think that we as a culture spend enough time really cultivating and thinking about. My focus on this book has been all along to challenge this assumption that leadership is this unquantifiable, optional, soft-skill, and help people see that it’s a required, measurable, hard-skill; it’s an organizational skill that, if you practice certain behaviors in certain ways – vision, engagement, execution – you and your organization will benefit. You’ll grow faster, your employees and your customers will be happier, and your business results in whatever way matters to you will improve. So, that’s what this is about. I hear too many people say, “my job is easy but working here is hard” and that almost always flows from assumptions about leadership.

Jason: 30:01 I just had a picture in my mind of that image where it says, “a lion leading one-thousand sheep is to be more feared than one sheep leading a thousand lions.” So, Dennis, thank you for your time, we really appreciate it – I know you’re a busy person. Have fun on your motorcycles and brew some more great beer. Okay, listeners, thanks for your time and remember to be great every day.

Social Media links for Dennis Brouwer and free resources below!!

Email”: Dennis@DLBrouwer
TW: @DLBrouwer
FB: TheReturnonLeadership page
LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlbrouwer

Free resources below!!

The link for info on the book is www.returnonleadership.info.  
Anyone who buys the book and emails their receipt to ReturnOnLeadership@gmail.com with the cavnessHR podcast in the subject line will receive bonus materials including a study guide, work sheets, additional stories that didn’t quite make it into the book and a photo gallery.