Join host Adam Markel as he dives deep into the world of leadership resilience strategies with Tom Freeley, CEO of CACM. In this engaging episode, Tom shares his journey from overcoming career burnout to navigating the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discover how Tom’s experiences have shaped his approach to leadership, mentorship, and fostering a collaborative work culture. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or aspiring professional, this conversation offers invaluable insights on thriving in the face of adversity. Don’t miss out on this inspiring discussion packed with practical advice and real-world examples.
Show Notes:
- 00:40 – Introversion And Extroversion
- 08:26 – Transition To CEO Role
- 12:28 – The Importance Of Resilience
- 24:39 – Impact Of COVID-19
- 29:24 – Leadership During Crisis
- 31:39 – Mentorship And Autonomy
- 38:44 – The Role Of Company Culture
- 44:59 – Collaboration And Communication
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Leadership Resilience Strategies With Tom Freeley
I’m excited for the gentleman that I have on the show. His name is Tom Freely. He is a seasoned professional with many years of experience in commercial condominium and homeowner association management. Tom is also an experienced veteran in customer service, managing and leading teams in high and luxury associations. His industry experience also includes CEO and positions of management for luxury high-rise condominiums, industry boards, and legislative committees.
Further, Tom’s experience includes disaster planning, emergency response, warranty reconstruction, and major loss restoration. Personally, Tom and his wife Lynn have been involved in a number of charitable organizations and philanthropic endeavors. He believes in giving back to his industry and their community. I know Tom quite well. I’ve worked with him and he’s a special person. You’re going to learn a great deal. You’re going to enjoy this conversation so sit back and get ready for my conversation with Tom Freeley.
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Tom, it’s fun to hear somebody read your bio. I get a kick out of it, like hearing somebody give the short or the long. The short version of the CV, I appreciate it. When somebody’s reading a long bio for me, it’s truly agonizing. I feel so uncomfortable. I didn’t see any signs of discomfort now from you, but what I want to ask you out of the gate is, what is one thing that is not part of your bio, your history, and career, etc., that you would love for people to know about you, something that’s not included in your standard bio?
That’s an intriguing question. That could go in a lot of different directions. Meaning a bio is a bio. You try to take 35 or 40 years of work experience and cram it into one paragraph and you go, “I can’t do that.” Back in the day, I was doing resumes, even for a resume for this position many years ago. I was trying to redo my resume. I had 5 or 6 pages. As a professional, I know you can’t create 5 or 6 pages of this craziness. It is very difficult to take a lot of professional career experience and cram it into a paragraph. That said, one thing that’s not on my bio is that I don’t put a lot of personal stuff in it.
I did in discipline because I’m married to an amazing person. I always add in at the bottom who my family is. A lot of people think that I’m an extrovert. When I met you, I got on stage in front of 1,200 people and did my thing. You get on stage in front of 1,200 people and do your thing. I spend two and a half days doing nothing but shaking hands and kissing babies as a host and an emcee at a large event.
In actuality, I’m an introvert. When I walk away from that, my wife and I take some quiet time. We’d sit there and chitchat just between the two of us. I’ve trained myself to be comfortable in pretty much any atmosphere where I can walk into, and at least have a semi-coherent conversation with anybody in a room. I’m uncomfortable a lot of the time. I’m an introvert. Most people disagree with this strongly, but that’s probably the one thing about me that nobody knows except for my wife and my children.
It’s funny. I wouldn’t have guessed that about you. I don’t know whether you would’ve guessed that about me either because I will refer to myself using a term that a friend of mine shared with me some years ago and she said, “You’re a situational extrovert.” I thought, “I’ll borrow it and pass it.” It is, in fact, that situation that draws it out call to service or call to being in support of other people. I’ve learned how to get over my tendency to be more comfortable alone or in a small group of folks. Maybe when I was younger, that might have even been shyness. I could have used that term when I was twelve years old.
For me, it’s the same way. Candidly, until I met my wife, Lynn, I was a very shy person and struggled in a lot of social settings and things like that. One day, she told me, which until this day makes me think, “I never thought I’d met somebody who has a bigger personality than I do.” I went, “I’m sorry, what? Who are you talking about? That’s certainly not me.” I’m also a believer in self-evaluation. When I hear things, I try not to react to anything. I always try to respond to things and respond usually takes a little bit of reflection to try to understand what was told to me or what experience I had, then turn around and then I can properly respond as opposed to reacting to whatever a comment was.
I took some time and did some reflection after the first time she told me that. I had to argue with myself about my introvert/extrovert process or thought process because she was right. I do have a very big personality. When I speak as an introvert, I speak more conversationally, more situationally. I could walk into a dance club, go to Belly Up in Solana Beach quite often, love the place, and I’ll be the one out in the middle of the door dancing crazy. She’s like, “Tom, just calm.” We’ll walk out of there and meet a bunch of people and I’ll be the quietest one in the crowd. There’s no logic to it, but it’s who I am. It seems to work for me and my wife hasn’t killed me yet, and it’s pretty not too bad for her, either.
I know where to find you now, and so does everybody else. The club that Tom is referring to is in Solana Beach, California. It is this great little club called the Belly Up. We know the owners of the club only because our youngest daughter and their youngest went to school together. They were in cheerleading together. They did a bunch of stuff together. It was neat. That’s a great place on the right evening to dance. They have other music there. Depending on the night, dancing would not be appropriate for some of the music that’s in there. They have a great diverse lineup, and that club has been around since the ‘70s.
They’ve been around a long time.
I’ve always wondered whether in that Bruce Springsteen song, and I love Bruce Springsteen, I’m not like a mega fan or anything, but I started listening to his music when I was a kid because my best friend’s older brother was into him. That’s the only reason we knew about him. I forgot what album it’s on; it might be in Greetings from Asbury Park. It’s in the song Rosalie or something like that. There’s a little place in Southern California where they play guitars all night and all day. I’ve always wondered whether he’s referring to the Belly Up.
That would be a very good trivia question to find out.
That’s a shout-out to the community here. If anybody knows the answer to that, please throw your answer to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast and let Tom and I know if you know the answer to that question.
The shameless plug, go to Belly Up and see Atomic Groove. A shameless plug for what I think is a great, high-energy band.
Atomic Groove is Friday nights typically or something like that.
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Transition To CEO Role
When you were answering that question at the beginning, you said you knew about your bio and that some years ago, you were reworking it. I’m going to follow the breadcrumbs to the point where you were working on your bio. What was it that led or what was the pivot? If there’s a pivot story behind why you were working on your bio many years ago that led you into this CEO role at CACM, I would love to know that better.
While I was editing my bio/resume to apply for this role, roughly, I think the application process started many years ago. I was in a play in our industry, which is very challenging. You have to be extremely resilient to be in this industry, which is homeowner association management, to clarify for your audience. After being in this industry for 35 to 40-ish years, I was getting to a burnout ratio at the industry in and of itself as a high level of burnout ratios. I was getting to that point. I knew I needed to make a change in my career in some capacity or another. I did not know what that was. This opportunity came to me, and what a lot of people don’t know is that I did not initially want to put my name on the hat.
I went home and spoke to my wife about it and she asked me, “Why aren’t you putting your name in for this role?” I went, “What do I know about running a nonprofit association?” She said, “Every homeowner association’s a nonprofit association and you know anything about the homeowner association where a trade association operates, but you do know everything about the industry.” I went, “That’s a very valid point.”
That started down the road of 6, 7, 8 months of interviews and going through the process. I happened to be at a good friend’s beach house in Newport Beach when I got the call that I was awarded this position. I remember hanging up the phone and I won’t repeat on the show my language, but I walked out of the bedroom that I was in and my good friend’s daughter was standing in the hallway and I went, “So sorry.”
Luckily, she’s an adult. She was like, “Tom, don’t worry about it,” but it was an exciting time. Going back to your question, it was going through the bio, going through a resume, and then obviously, whenever you start a new role, you have to modify your previous bios and it takes a lot of time to cram all this experience into a paragraph or two and get a bio. I’ve read 100 bios in my life, introducing people and on. Taking a long bio just to read the long bio makes me feel uncomfortable, but having somebody else read a long bio about me makes me seriously uncomfortable. I’ve got to find a way of shortening this up and cramming it in. Hopefully, it’s not too bad.
You mentioned resilience. It’s a great lead-in. I don’t know that you did that on purpose, but it’s a softball for me, which is good. Since I’m interviewing you, I’m going to put it back to you though. Where have you had to be the most resilient in your career to this point, and has it been in your life before you took on this role and were awarded this role? I love the way you said that awarded the role and then you immediately spontaneously celebrated. Everybody reading gets a sense you were quite joyful about it. Maybe give us a resilience and answer to the question of where you’ve had to be most resilient both before and after that event.
Before, it’s easier to address. It’s easier to address the after because I have a very specific challenge that we had to be very resilient through. As I said, this is a very challenging industry. I was working for a management company in New Rochelle, New York. I got headhunted to take my career in Manhattan for a very large company. How thrilled this was the coolest thing. After the first board meeting, I felt very confident that, “Now I’ve taken my rental hat off, put my condo, co-op, and commercial hat on and started a whole new career.” It takes a lot of resilience to start a new chapter or a new career. After my 10th board meeting, one of the board members ate me alive and verbally destroyed me. I right back at him because I was a New Yorker, destroyed him.
It takes a lot of resilience just to start a new chapter or a new career. Share on X
I got back to the office. I found out that I could have lost my job on that spot and went, “Ah.” I can’t react to those things. I have to learn how to keep my mouth shut and take it you go, “There are ways of working through those challenging conversations.” I spent many years throughout my career learning how to be resilient, learning how to not react to things and be more responsive and reaction. If you don’t mind, I’ll tap on my mentor at this point because it fits into this category very well.
He may not realize that he was a mentor. It wasn’t like we sat down and said, “Can you be my mentor,” or whatever. But his name is Richard Deutsch. He’s an author out of Aach, New York. He was my senior at the time. He’s now a successful author. I strongly encourage people to read his books and shameless plug, they’re all based on where he lives in that general area.
He was probably the smartest guy I knew in the industry, let alone in general. He took tremendous time to carry me literally through a lot of the processes of my career that, at the time, I didn’t understand. I was still going through the process of learning the ins and outs of community management and high-rise management. He was calm, cold, and collected through the whole thing for years. Walk me through every little step. He is a great guy. The next resilience was that we relocated our lives at the time as equestrians.
I want to pause you there for a second. The reason is because the situation that you described where you almost or could have, let’s say, theoretically could have lost your job. I think that’s a thing that a lot of people deal with and maybe don’t deal with effectively. Maybe they’ve also gotten away with it the way you did in that moment, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe it cost them their job or something, or maybe it’s a situation that’s literally ongoing for them right now. I want to unpack that with you a little bit regarding how you define what resilience meant or looked like going forward, meaning, with your mentor’s assistance, what you might’ve learned. Share a little bit about what that looks like or is like for you mentally, emotionally and physically.
Resilience to me is trying to cope with tough situations and standing up on the other side, getting knocked down, getting back up. A lot of people take that very hard, especially in their careers. As I said, I do believe in self-reflection. At the time, I was reacting to a situation where somebody was confronting me and aggressively. I was young. I was aggressive, living and working in Manhattan. I gave the pushback. After meeting with Richard and going through the conversations and mentoring from his perspective, I then had to go back and reevaluate, think through, “In the future, this is not going to be the last time somebody’s going to confront me,” because that goes with this industry.
I needed to learn how to adjust, pivot, be responsive, and not be reactive. That was one of the first training, if you will, for me to learn that being responsive is far more appropriate. It helps both of us. It helps both the other person to who I’m responding to. If you respond, it helps reduce the temperature in the room. If I’ve learned nothing in my career, if I’ve learned anything in my career, it would be to be responsive as opposed to reactive. I help preach that as often as I can.
I came upon some research that I found fascinating, which said that when emotions are high, when people are very highly charged and feeling stress, their intelligence goes down by 13 IQ points. Thirteen points is a lot of IQ points. When you think about where we are in our world now and why there are certain things that you think, I can’t believe that’s happening or I can’t believe people are reacting in the way they’re reacting because they literally are dumber, and perhaps even as a society we are a little dumber or maybe not little and that’s a result of how our bodies respond to stress, but extreme stress or feeling threat because there’s a biochemical change, which we don’t need to get into.
I’ve tried to try to tell people at the same time, and I only do it because I experience it. When I get very upset or very angry, people start to talk fast. When you talk fast, your brain’s not getting a proper amount of oxygen. When your brain’s not getting the proper amount of oxygen, your brain is not working in conjunction with your mouth. You’re saying things before your brain says, “Don’t say that.”
This is perfect because it’s what I wanted to ask you about. In the moment now, if, let’s say, you were in the situation that you found yourself in back then, what would be different? Physically speaking or mentally, what would be different for you in that situation today?
After many years in this industry and having countless situations that are exactly the same, some worse, I’ve learned and taught myself to be responsive and not to take whatever aggression is coming at me, at least in the professional world, and try to narrow it down and try to say, “I understand what’s going on. Help me understand what exactly is causing you this aggression, and let’s see if we can’t figure it out. If we can’t, let’s take a pause and meet back tomorrow and rehash some of this, we can both have calmer heads.” To me, it’s a simple fact of being responsive instead of reactionary. If you respond to people and no matter what the situation is, if you’re responsive and not reactionary, probably you’re going to have a brighter future, a brighter ending to that one confrontation than you would if you were the opposite and start reacting to everything.
If you're responsive and not reactionary, you're probably going to have a brighter future. Share on X
The power of the pause, this is something you’ve had a Shameless Plug or two to do the same to say like in the book Change Proof, we talk about this pause, ask, choose process. The power of the pause is undervalued, I think, by a lot of people. They don’t understand how powerful it is to pause. In fact, on the radio, the pause and the dead air time are taboo. I think a lot of people think somehow or another when it comes to their response time to people, that a pause is also some sign of something that they’re not comfortable with. That pause, especially as you say, when the purpose of the pause is to evaluate, to not pause with no intended outcome or no agenda.
My agenda when I pause is to take a breath. It’s to allow my brain to catch up to what might be happening in my body on a biochemical level. It’s like the cortisol, “The adrenaline is flowing. I feel threatened. I feel somebody’s going after me.” I also grew up in New York. It’s like there’s some DNA thing that makes us act ready to fight back.
When you allow yourself and your brain to catch up with your body, you might find that there are some other options available, including more evaluative questions to ask to understand as the word is used a lot today to express empathy or at least to try to have some empathy and compassion, what it’s like to be in that other person’s shoes or to sit quietly to listen or to even take them if you’re being abused or if there’s a situation where you feel like you don’t know what to do but it doesn’t feel good, whatever you’re experiencing feels like crap. You could say, “Is it possible for us to take a pause here and come back to this conversation an hour a day or weekly? Let’s take this table for the net calendar for 2030.”
I’m a firm believer in taking the pause. I think it’s a very smart avenue and it’s easier than anything else. It’s easier to go, “We’re obviously miscommunicating in some way. I’m not saying it’s you, I’m not saying it’s me, but obviously, there’s some miscommunication going on. Let’s call it a day and revisit this conversation after we both have a little time to go through what we talked about and see if the next conversation could be a little more professional or calmer. “
The resiliency theme, as you said, there’s that event. What of more recent vintage would you say has caused you to lean on your resiliency?
Impact Of COVID-19
As a CEO leaders always have to have resiliency. There are always challenges. I’d say when I took this role and COVID hit was probably the absolute hardest challenge in trying to be resilient as I could, throughout my whole career specifically, everybody says, “It’s COVID. We all had to pivot.” I get that. My situation Is no different. My circumstances were a little different. The law seminars that we were happy to have you at at the Disneyland Convention Center on March 12, 2020. On March 11th at 11:30 at night, the governor came out and stated that conventions or groups of 500 or more people were now prohibited. It was about three weeks too late for me, but I kept trying to negotiate getting out of this law seminar because this was going to be a challenge from a health perspective.
The contract negotiations were very difficult to get out of, “The people on the other side of the table were basically taking the position. We understand that there’s a pandemic, but we have all the resources to protect your people. We have all the resources to provide the services that we are contracted to provide. We want to move forward.” That’s when we went, “Okay, so we’re going to move forward.”
We played a little bit of chicken. I didn’t want to take a hard-line position to cancel the contract, which I had the right to do, but I would’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. That was not prudent in any business sense, let alone for a nonprofit organization. We move forward. We found out at 5:30 in the morning when I got up to start preparing for this event that the governor made this mandate.
I immediately started making phone calls at 5:30 in the morning. As we move forward, we’re completely violating state mandates and so on. The audience that you saw at Disney was that audience plus this a little bit. It’s about 1,200 people who spend a lot of money to book hotel rooms, travel, and go to Disney. Some of the industry partners spend a fortune putting together their boots and hiring contractors and designers to come in and create this fantastic atmosphere in a 10 by 20 space. I had to get on stage and basically tell everybody, “How was breakfast?” A lot of them go, “Good.” “I’m glad you enjoyed it. You all need to go home now.” You could have heard a pin drop in a room of 1,200 people.
I looked around the room and went, “I’m not kidding. I’m serious. The governor came out last night and did this. Please go to the front desk, check out of your rooms, and work it out with Disney on your rooms. We’ll see you again.” At that time, I didn’t know if this organization would succeed or make it through the tail end of the pandemic, but I had to be resilient to carry the organization forward.
I could have stuck my head in the sand and went, “This sucks,” but it’s not who I am. I attacked it and thankfully, all of my career training and learning and self-reflection gave me the wherewithal to be able to be resilient beyond anything I thought I was capable of doing and solving that problem for a couple of weeks post that one event and then obviously for the rest of that year and the following years. That was probably the hardest challenge I’ve had in my career professionally.
You must have witnessed a lot of great leadership and probably some not-so-great leadership during that period of time. Maybe without naming names there, can you think of an example of what great leadership looked like for you through that period? Maybe even if it comes to mind, something that was not great leadership as well?
On my end or what I experienced?
What you experienced, it could be on your end, but might also be an observation of others or other situations.
Obviously, we, in a grouping of 1,200 people that spent a lot of money to go there and now have to get up and leave literally with no idea how this was going to pan out, whether they’re going to get refunds or not get a refund. There were many unanswered questions. Naturally, we fielded for a couple of days sitting on-site a whole lot of different perspectives, very aggressive to, “We get it. Good luck. Let us know if we can help.” Certainly, without naming names, there was a lot of aggression, understandably.
Understandably, meaning I get their perspective. I don’t understand the aggression side of it because it’s not like I had a whole lot of choices here. Putting that aside, I understood the perspective. I did the best that I could to loo. I walk it through calmly. I had to stay calm through the whole process. We worked it out with all the different stakeholders over the course of that year and financially, we ended the year on a positive note, which was a shock to me that we were able to do that. Positive revenue for nonprofits during that period of time was unheard of. It was very successful, but it was a very challenging year.
You mentioned a mentor in the past, do you mentor others in your current role? Is that a thing that you take on in an intentional way?
Mentorship And Autonomy
I take it on intentionally, whether they know that’s being taken unintentionally or not, I hope they do, but it’s not a conversation that I’ve sat down with people and said, “I will be your mentor,” or they have asked, “Will you be my mentor?” To me, for some reason, that’s an awkward thing. It puts undue responsibilities when it should be a natural process. There are a few people on this team who have opened up doors and windows to their career when they sat back and went, “I don’t know anything about that. Why are you asking me to do this?”
I said, “It’s because I see it in you. Good leaders are supposed to build good leaders. Good leaders aren’t supposed to lead by, ‘Follow me, do what I do.’ Leaders are supposed to say, ‘I’ll follow you. You walk out in front. I’m right here. I’ll hold you up. No problems being your support system, but you’re a professional in your specific role. Go do that. I will be right here to make sure that when you make a misstep and you have to understand you will, we all do. Learn, take a misstep, don’t let it crumble your world. Learn from it. Change is a very constant thing. It’s the only constant thing. if people learn how to respond to change instead of reacting to change, then I think they’ll do better on the other end.” I try to mentor as many people on my team as I can. As a father, you mentor your children the best you can, too, but sometimes that sets in, and sometimes not.
I hear you saying it’s like you’re giving people space to experience their potential.
I’m giving them autonomy. Yes, I’m giving them space. As a CEO, I tend to get a lot of people coming to me and asking me questions, “Will you approve this? Will you approve that?” I’d say 90% of the time, I kick it back and basically go, “Would you? Do you approve this? Are you bringing this to me for approval or are you bringing this to me because this is something that you think is successful and you believe in it or are you looking for me to make a decision for you because I’m not going to do that? You’re the one who, whatever the situation is, if you’re asking me to make a decision that’s going to impact your job or what you do, wouldn’t it be more appropriate that you accept that and then tell me that’s what you want to do, as opposed to saying, is it okay?”
I try to change things a little to let people realize they have autonomy. I think everybody in any company should have autonomy. I think everybody in any company should have a voice to be able to be involved in decision-making. A lot of corporate comments, as I’m sure you’ve seen over the years, is, “We can’t lead by committee.” I agree that you can’t lead by committee, but that doesn’t mean you don’t take the advice of the committee. We have to ask the people around you, “What exactly is going to be successful? What do you think is going to be successful?” I firmly believe that in any team, no matter what company you’re in, big or small, you can tell your seniors, “I have this idea,” or in my case, better, “You’re thinking the wrong way, Tom. You’re going down a path that we probably shouldn’t go down. Here’s an alternate path.”
I try to tell all my new members, when we have new team members, I sit them down and say, “Just because I say something doesn’t mean it’s the rule. That doesn’t mean I can’t be convinced otherwise. Obviously, I have the responsibility and final decision-making. However, that decision-making is usually based off of everybody else’s input. If you see me going down the wrong path, I not only hope, but I expect you to tell me I’m going down the wrong path because I don’t know it all. I’m not the smartest person in the room. I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. None of us are the smartest person in the room.” I try to open it up and provide as much autonomy as I possibly can.
You just gave a mini workshop on that whole concept of decision-making. I think the distinctions are, I won’t repeat them. For the person reading this, if that made sense to you, go back and re-read that good stuff there. Tom, thank you for that. One last question for you here. I’ve heard anecdotally, and I’ve seen it from personal experience, the culture was very important in getting through the pandemic because we’ve talked a little bit about that, what that was like and the culture, in many instances, was what got people through the pandemic, got organizations through. I’ve heard that quite frequently.
On the other side of that lengthy event, the world of business and what organizations look like quite a bit different from a talent standpoint, from a number of different standpoints. There was plenty of pivoting going on, and plenty of restructuring happening. I’m curious about what you think in a post-pandemic world. What is the importance of culture to you? Did you notice that the culture at your nonprofit changed? In some ways, I’ve heard that has been the case for many groups, but how important is culture and what, if anything, can you tell us about maybe how you saw culture evolve through that very difficult period?
The Role Of Company Culture
I think culture is vital to corporations and a lot of people hire people to fit a job. I try to remind my staff when they’re looking at candidates and, more importantly, interviewing candidates that we’re looking to fill a role. That goes without saying. That’s why we’re interviewing, but I’d rather have a vacant role than hire somebody who is not going to fit into the culture of the organization.
My staff is starting to understand that concept. Any leader who’s honest will say that they took advantage of COVID, did a little bit of restructuring and a little bit of changing, and the culture within our organization to, in their view, improve that culture. I had a few challenges that we dealt with. Interestingly enough, I had to get all kinds of laptops and get people home and all this stuff that goes with working remotely.
I had a lot of pushback on people working remotely. I found that intriguing because most people, especially now, want to work remotely. A couple of months later, we started thinking about bringing people back and I tried to create some hybrid schedule and so on. We worked through the rest of that year in a skeleton crew.
I found that people wanted to be back. They didn’t want to work remotely, which was an intriguing culture to me because usually, people want their home. They’re like, “I can work in my pajamas or whatever, wherever. I can do anything.” I had a nephew who moved to Aruba for two months and worked remotely in some cabin on an ocean. I was like, “Okay. It’s a thing, I guess.” It was cool, but then when we did come back, the culture instantly changed, having nothing to do with me. You could see people wanted to be together; they wanted to collaborate with each other.
Now, I have a handful of staff members that work remotely one day a week. They’ve chosen a specific day and that’s their day to work remotely. It seems to satisfy the psychological concept of working remotely. It was a challenge for me. I’m old school. I’ve been in a professional career for a very long time, and I believe in customer service and personal business. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I needed to be a little resilient and understand that challenge. I did. We created a policy around it and now we have a culture here that is very collaborative. Our team built a social committee that comes up with random things. We’re doing a Mother’s Day luncheon on Friday. We have a whole wall or one section of our wall.
We all chose a word for 2024 that would explain what our thought process is within one word. We designed this cool thing on our wall with everybody’s different words and new team members come in and we get that word from them and then we add to it. To answer the question specifically, I think culture is vital to any organization, but that culture is independent and needs to be defined by the company, not by the leadership. Leadership can create the boundaries of culture, but I think a leader needs to allow the culture to develop and collaboration to come naturally.
When it does come natural, and I’m extremely fortunate that it comes natural here, people learn from each other, they talk to each other, they communicate with each other. I find things out that a problem came up, it was addressed and resolved before I even had knowledge that something came out that there was a problem.
Collaboration And Communication
That’s all internal collaboration that, as a leader, you can’t just say, “This is what I want.” You have to create that openness. You have to create the ability to communicate. You have to create the opportunity for people to have independent autonomy and feel comfortable telling me, the CEO, “You’re going down the wrong path. You need to go down this path. You need to rethink going down this path.” When you create that ability within your team, I think at least it creates independence and buy-in from the rest of my team that they have a say in how this organization moves forward.
We make very big, long-term decisions that we make collectively. I make the final decision, but I take all of the input from my entire team and say, “This is going to work. That’s going to work. We talk it out. We hammer it out,” then I say, “This is great advice. I can’t do that right now. This is why, but let’s keep that open for the future. This is a great advice. We’re going to move forward with this, whatever the case may be. It allows a culture of communication and collaboration. I don’t think any corporation will be successful without that level of culture within the organization, but who am I?
To me, who you are is a human being fallible like everybody. As you said, nobody has all the answers. Nobody’s smartest in the room. I’ve been around a minute or two myself, so when I listened to you express what you did, I thought that was comprehensive and it felt like sage advice, the wisdom of somebody that’s been around long enough to know these things, not know them because they’re in a textbook or because you watch it on a YouTube video, but because it’s a lived experience which informs the worldview. I couldn’t be more grateful for your time, presence, and wisdom you shared with us.
I greatly appreciate the opportunity. It’s an honor to be a part of it. I appreciate it, and I thank you for the opportunity to join you.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Tom. When you get to speak to somebody that has been around the block more than a minute, I think what you can get is either somebody that’s stuck in their ways and has a very set and maybe even narrow view on how things are supposed to be done and there’s certainly plenty of people like that. There are plenty of people in leadership roles, and matching other people can sometimes come from that narrow head space. Obviously, what you can hear from listening to Tom is that even after 34 years in plus industry that he’s in, and now in the role of chief leader within his nonprofit, the nonprofit that he is CEO of, you get the sense that this is a guy who’s still learning.
This is a guy who has humility and values, other people’s opinions, and values creating a space for people to grow and thrive. I love what he said about mentorship and the idea that it’s less about a paint-by-number approach or one that is formulaic, but rather it’s something where you allow there to be this space for mentorship to occur and that there has to be intentionality. It doesn’t happen randomly, but it doesn’t need to be put into a restrictive container, and it’s more free-flowing than that.
I love that. I love what he said and shared about the art of communication and how the role of of a leader is often to empower others to make decisions, to be able to own those decisions, but also to see that it’s vitally important that their instincts about whether to take an action, not take an action, make an investment, not make an investment, be strategic or make a decision about a strategy.
Those things have to be developed from within that we have to formulate our own instincts and our own guidance and wisdom about them. It’s important that we keep other people in the loop, let people know how we feel, and advocate for the things we are most passionate about. At the same time, we’re not necessarily seeking approval in the sense that we’re asking somebody else to make that decision for us or to override even those instincts that we have.
I get it’s a delicate balance, but I loved how, in the structure of this organization, he invites people to own those decisions and to provide him with enough information that he can be a voice in the conversation as well, and share his thoughts, but ultimately give people the opportunity to make those decisions and sometimes to make mistakes in the process because as he said, that’s inevitable. We’re all going to make mistakes. I love that from the standpoint of what it contributes to a culture of collaboration and those were the words he used.
The idea that in a culture that is by design, you have to understand that so much of it, we don’t design, we can’t design, but we have to allow to occur that there has to be space for those things to grow and be nurtured. There are parameters. There are things that also have to be supported, almost like a container that holds something within it.
The culture is more the container, and what grows and what develops organically within it, like collaboration and communication, are the natural result of there being a structure that supports the growth of those things. There’s some nuance, of course, to that and what it looks like in each individual business and is based on any number of factors, too many to count at this moment certainly. I love Tom’s thoughts on that and his insights.
I thought they were quite sage and that there was a lot to be learned, a lot to be gained from leaning in and even re-reading some of what his thoughts were because the guy has been doing this successfully for a long time and has learned a lot and is not one of those individuals that you could tell has an intractable mindset, but rather the opposite. He has a learning and growth mindset, and he applies self-awareness and self-reflection to himself first and foremost.
That’s my experience of him, having met him personally. It was an honor to be asked to speak and keynote at two of their law conferences recently. They are very large events like the one that he was referring to having had to cancel during the very outset of the pandemic and all of that. If you’ve got questions for Tom or me, always feel free to go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast to leave your comment or your question there for us.
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About Tom Freeley
Tom leads a California statewide trade association. With 40 years of experience in a challenging industry, Tom has owned his own management firm and held executive level positions throughout his career. In a career where every day is different and can pose challenges, he has learned resiliency in believing that change is the only constant, and we learn from mistakes. Accept falling down but always get back up.