Recovering Leadership with Thomas Hill

Thomas Hill III is the chief executive officer of Kimray, Inc. As the grandson of Kimray's founder, Garman Kimmell, Thomas grew up around the family business and manages the family-owned company with a sense of stewardship and heritage. 

In 1948, Kimray revolutionized pressure regulation in the oil and gas industry by introducing a three-inch pilot-operated back pressure regulator. The company has since grown to be a globally-known manufacturer of a comprehensive line of reliable, smart, and inventive American-made control equipment for safely and efficiently producing oil and gas. Having worked in virtually every department, Thomas has an intimate knowledge of the processes and people involved from start to finish. 

Thomas grew up in a high-performing family, which shaped his belief that people are worth what they can accomplish. This sent Thomas on a long and unfulfilling journey of pursuing success by constantly doing bigger and better things. Life eventually spun out of control, and Thomas hit rock bottom. Unfortunately, this meant Kimray hit rock bottom at the same time. 

Thomas's story does not end there. Through significant pain and loss, he began the long and difficult road of recovery that transformed his life and leadership. Today, Thomas enjoys sharing his story with others who can benefit from the lessons he has learned. He is committed to carrying the message of Recovering Leadership to other "addict leaders" and practicing these principles in his personal life.

A Couple of Quotes From This Episode

• “Making money is easy. Making money without harming other people is hard.” 
• “I wasn’t a leader. I just needed people to do what I needed them to do.” 
• “The more transparent I am, the more people want to follow.” 
• “Leadership is not about knowing what to do. It is about developing people who know what to do.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

• Book: Recovering Leadership: Musings of an Addict Leader by Thomas Hill

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Attend The Global Conference in Toronto, October 28-31.

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

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Transcript

Welcome And Setup

Scott Allen 1:40

Okay, everybody. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Very excited for this conversation. And it's been a little while in the works. I have Thomas Hill, and he is many things. I'm going to let him introduce himself in a moment. But this conversation, he wrote a book that is just unlike any other leadership book. And I've read a leadership book or two. It's been my jam for 25 plus years. But this one just really it just caught my attention. And so super excited for the conversation today. Thomas, thank you for being here. Maybe introduce yourself and then we'll jump into the focus of our conversation. Thank you, sir, for being here.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Well, absolutely. I am honored and humbled to be here and have really enjoyed getting to know you, Scott, and to hear your perspective on things. And so I'm excited to talk. I really am. And I gotta say, I was forced to write the book. I don't know why anybody would write a book. That's a silly thing to do. I read a lot of books and then I regret having read a lot of the books that I read because I feel like I'll never get that time back. So I really appreciate your comments. I would encourage your audience if they do decide to read my book. If they keep their expectations really low, they might not be disappointed. But I am Thomas Hill. I'm the CEO of Kimray now. We'll probably get into a little bit of my story. If you ask me the right questions, you'll never know what you might find out about me. But Kimray is an oil and gas manufacturing company. We make the controls that handle fluids and pressures and production equipment on basically at the well site. So we're upstream. We've been in business for 77 years. My grandfather founded the company in 1948 by inventing a particular back pressure regulator that was different than anything anybody had done previously. It was much more accurate and maintained its set point across a wide range of flow, which was not capable, nobody was capable of doing that before. And that set Kim Ray up to be the de facto standard for production control at the well site. And that's how people perceive us today. In fact, if you're new in the industry, your boss is liable to tell you to go to the Kemray website and watch all of our videos on production because that's the best way to learn how to produce and how to run production equipment. And so we've been very successful in a very volatile and difficult industry for a couple of reasons. One, my grandfather was a genius, had 44 patents to his name. And two, we believe in some really simple things. At Kimray, we believe that everyone is intrinsically and equally valuable. And that's how we treat our people. That's how we treat the community around us. That's certainly how we treat our customers. We believe that if you do good work and produce good products and say and do what you said you'd do, that people will buy your products and continue to be customers, and that's been true now for seven decades. And it's really not complicated. I tell people making money is easy. Making money without harming other people is hard. And so we work really hard to make sure that we're not harming people. And we do work in an industry that is often misunderstood. People are not huge fans of the hydrocarbon industry. I didn't create the industry. I didn't create the things that use oil and gas. We still need it. And as long as we need it, we're going to be one of the companies that make sure that people are producing it responsibly. And so we put a lot of effort into environmentally friendly controls, making sure that we can produce the oil and gas that we need without spilling it or leaking it into the environment unnecessarily. So that's one of our one of our standpoints. But worked in the company my entire life and started at Kemray when I was six. I tell people, my grandfather and father obviously were already here, played out in the shop and had my first real job was at Kemray at 16 years old working in assembly. And so I've built our product, I've designed our product, I've applied our product, I've sold our product, I've gone out on offshore and in short onshore and all over the place and just loved it. And about now 14 years ago in 2012, I blew my life up. And that's a long story, and I'll let your listeners read the book. We we don't have to get into all of that. But I left Kimmer. I was fired from my job. I was the president at the time. Never thought I would come back, but after a couple of months in rehab and a year of working on myself and figuring out my identity, I got an opportunity to come back in a junior role and then later got promoted back to CEO. And for the last decade plus, my goal has been to lead an organization from a place of valuing people more than we value profits and making sure that our corporate culture, which is really just the experience that our people have, is one where people feel valued and safe and cared for. I believe that if you do that, you get everything else. If you go after everything else and don't treat people with dignity and humanity and respect, then you're liable to not get anything. And so it has worked out to be true, and we're pretty excited about that.

Scott Allen 6:48

You okay, so that statement right there, that is a really important statement because probably the statement that uh caught me flat footed the most because of the honesty and authenticity of the statement. For listeners, uh Thomas wrote a book, it's recovering leadership. And so the full title, Recovering Leadership, Musings of an Addict Leader. You have a statement in the book and it goes like this. Make no mistake, the addict leader has a vision of the future where his or her needs are met. So take me back to that space there, because I think what you just said is so beautiful, that people first culture, and if we take care of them. But take me to that place where you were just consumed with your own needs. I find it fascinating. And I find the authenticity and the honesty and the vulnerability, Thomas, incredible. I really do. It was a great read. So take me to that quote right there.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Addiction is complex and simple at the same time. And in its simplicity, it is the most selfish state of humanity. And it's where we care more about meeting our immediate needs, regardless of the consequences to ourselves or others, than we care about anything else. And that's why addicts always end up destroying everything and sometimes even themselves. Addiction always leads in death. There are lots of different kinds of death of relationships, death of opportunity, and ultimately it can even end up in physical death. And it's because we constantly exchange everything else that is available in human interactions for immediate gratification of whatever need we have. Now, often that need is generated by real trauma, real emotional and sometimes physical pain that we have no way of coping with. No one taught us, and that we don't understand, we don't know what to do. And so we learn that we can take drugs or drink or do things. I'm a process addict. I'm not a uh I don't have a substance abuse issue. I was a process addict, which means I do things. I have processes. Some of them are compulsive, continual. I don't check the door all the time. It's not that kind of OCD. It's more just, any rate, long story, lots of things, not all of which were bad. They were just disruptive. Some of them were not good and were not socially or morally acceptable. And eventually what worked yesterday doesn't work today. So you do more and more, whether it's drugs or alcohol or whatever, and eventually you just can't hide anymore. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, you're destroying yourself and destroying the people around you. And that's what happened to me. Up until then, up until it falls apart, one of the things that addicts are really good at is because we have to be, a lot of addicts are actually extremely intelligent people, juggling and managing because it's a it's a disaster in the works. And I'm really good at doing. I learned early on in my life that made me feel good. Performing made me feel good. You win, you get the accolade, you get your name on the list, you get the award, whatever. You get a car, you get a bigger house, you get more money in the bank. And I had all of those things. In 2012, if you had looked at me from the outside, you probably would have wanted to be me. You would have wanted my life. It looked great. Inside, I was a mess. And I just got to the point where I couldn't make it work anymore. And when that happens, then everybody around you goes, Oh, this is not okay. And so they fired me because I wasn't doing my job. But up until then, up until it actually fell apart, I did lots and lots of things that looked good. Created things that were helpful for other people. I co-founded the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, which this day is one of the world's must-run marathons that generates millions of dollars for the Oklahoma City Memorial, which is a wonderful thing. Just I did all kinds of things that on the outside look great. And they do have a very real element of being helpful to society. But every single one of them, the motivation for me to do it was that it benefited me. It made me feel good. It made, it gave me identity, it gave me value because I thought my value was from what I did. And so that meant that I was using all the people around me to accomplish those things, not because I wanted them to be part of something meaningful, but because I needed them to be a cog in the wheel that would create my thing. So that's what I'm talking about when I say addicts are always meeting their own need. They have a vision. I have always had vision. I've always seen bigger in the future and whatever. But I was always driving that in a direction that fulfilled my need to be valuable in some messed up way. And that ends up harming the people around you. You end up using the people around you, even if you don't. I wasn't mean. I tell people all the time I was a good boss. I wasn't mean to people. I was Kim Ray has always been a great place. We take good care of our people, we pay them well. That's always been true. But I was a boss. I wasn't a leader. I wasn't interested in developing people. I wasn't interested in them thriving and them getting to be better and better versions of themselves. I just needed them to do what I needed them to do so that I could get what I wanted. And it looked great to a lot of people, but it was it was wrong from my standpoint. Does that make sense?

Scott Allen 12:17

And and we also know from the research that at times the people who are raising their hands and seeking out the leadership positions, a faction of them are seeking them out, the power, the authority, the access, the resources to fulfill a need. And I think you said something really important. I think many of us have experienced some level of trauma in our lives. And for me, a version of that was an unhappy home and some anger on one side and some substance abuse on the other side and a pretty tragic long drawn-out divorce. And I have spent years. My undergraduate degree was family social science, which is basically family therapy or family systems theory, because how do we how do I have a healthy, happy, sustainable family? That right but I've spent years uh in therapy and with mentors, and my wife is incredible working to make that whole. But I think there's a lot of folks who haven't uh looked within, and of course there's times where I don't want to look within and they seek out these positions of authority, and that's filling a gap, but it's really not filling it. There's holes.

unknown 13:45

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. The unfortunately the lie is that the things that we go to to attempt to make ourselves whole don't make us whole.

Scott Allen 13:56

No.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Only being whole makes you whole. And that takes incredible work and discipline, which a lot of people are either unaware of or unwilling to do until they don't have a choice. And I'm not a hero. I literally was driven to recovery, right? I didn't have a choice. I I lost everything. And if I hadn't lost everything, because I up until that point, I had not chosen to do anything about who I was or the problems I had, was forced into that. And that happens for a lot of addicts. Kind of one of my missions in life. We started a foundation, the Kimmel Foundation for Recovering Leadership. I'm hoping that I can speak to leaders before they've gone so far down the road that they don't really have a choice but for it to blow up for them to get better. If I can tell my story and talk about how these things look early in people's careers, my favorite group to talk to is college students that are getting ready to graduate. They're self-selected leaders, but they're not in leadership roles. They haven't started putting on all the stuff that then becomes difficult to dismantle. And I just tell them look, your identity is so critical to your leadership. And if you do not understand who you are, and if you're looking to power and position and possessions and all the things that you do to create identity and make you valuable, you are destined to harm yourself and other people in that. You have to be comfortable with yourself. You have to be comfortable. We can go back to Maslow's needs. And if we look one of the things that I love is the whole theory of nonviolent communication, which is really just, do I understand my needs and do I understand that the way I'm behaving is driven by my attempt to meet, get those needs met? And when I'm getting everyone else to meet those needs, that's a problem because I'm going to harm those people in doing that. I need to be capable of meeting my needs myself, which means that I need to understand myself. And very few of us do. And it's not when none of us have done anything wrong. It's not that you're wrong. It's that nobody taught you. And then they didn't know, so they didn't teach you. And it's just like you often parent the way your parents parented you, or you parent in a reaction to the way your parents parented you. And neither one of those are healthy. Where we need to be looking for what is true and what works, not just the default. And I just find so many leaders that are in default mode. That was what they were trained, how they were taught, and they're just doing the best they can and they're too deep. They're too underwater before they realize that what they're doing doesn't work, and then they don't have any choice because if I tell everybody I'm not doing okay, then I'm a fraud and everybody everybody will walk away. One of my greatest fears early on in recovery was that if I acknowledge, well, before recovery, I mean, my fear all along, up until the day everything fell apart, was if anybody knew what was going on inside of me, I would lose my job, nobody would pay any attention to me, I would become nothing, I would become nobody.

Scott Allen 16:51

Yeah.

Steps, Inventory, And Daily Apologies

SPEAKER_01 16:52

And the bizarre irony of my recovery and my coming back into leadership is the more honest I am about where I am and where I've been, the more people want to listen to me and follow me. I don't mean to sound, I don't mean that in an arrogant way. It's just that the exact opposite happens. The more transparent I am, the more vulnerable I am, the more willing people are to follow me or at least to participate in what I'm envisioning and what I'm trying to accomplish. It's the exact opposite of what you would think. They don't run from you, they run to you. And that was a shock to me, but one that I've leaned into.

Scott Allen 17:30

Yeah, there's that authenticity is a tractor beam, that vulnerability is a tractor beam. And uh I'm really interested in kind of this concept of wholeness. For me, therapy has been a way of becoming more whole. I went on a walk yesterday, talked to Phil, had a great conversation, had been with him for 18 years, and just talked about some things happening in our household right now that he was helping me make sense of. But what are some of those foundational elements of you being whole? What's part of your recipe? Obviously, it's a dis different recipe for everybody, but what are some of those things that have really helped you live into that space where you can be you, where you can feel more whole. I don't know that we ever feel 100% whole. Maybe you do.

Integration, Integrity, And Making People Feel Valued

SPEAKER_01 18:23

I'd but yeah, so maybe I'll introduce a couple of different terms that are helpful to me. First of all, we're not ever going to be perfect. And so I think a lot of people think that whole means perfect or somehow perfected, and that's not the case. So when you say we're not ever going to be whole, what I would say is we're not ever going to be perfect. Yeah. So I'm always going to make mistakes. I'm always going to step on other people in ways that I wish I hadn't afterwards. Love it. So what are foundational for me being in recovery, I work the steps all the time. Yeah. First three steps are how I get through the day, right? I find myself in a situation. I acknowledge that this is insanity. I acknowledge that I don't have the ability to control everybody and everything around me, but my higher power, which for me is the traditional God of the Bible, does. And so I turn things over to God rather than trying to seize control of everything. Doesn't mean I don't have responsibilities and doesn't mean that I don't have things that I'm supposed to be doing. But I have a tendency to want to be God. I have a tendency to want to control everything and be in charge of everything. I just have to let that go every day. And then later on in the steps, we do our inventory. And in an initial phase of recovery, that's a very severe and very deep and very difficult, completely fearless moral inventory, everything I've ever done in my entire life that was horrific and terrible. And you feel like you need to take a shower every 15 minutes while you're doing that work. But on a daily basis, for me, that inventory is just asking myself, was I the person that I want to be in the interactions that I had with people today? And if I'm if I wasn't, if I acknowledge that I wasn't, what am I going to do about that? In some cases, it's too different. In some cases, it's I show up on a Tuesday morning and I walk into someone's office and I say, hey, yesterday in that meeting, I said something that devalued you and I didn't mean to devalue you, but I wasn't being intentional. I wasn't being the person I want to be with. You forgive me for that, and I'm going to try not to do that again. It is shocking what happens when leaders are willing to admit that they made a mistake. Yes. Aren't the person that they were supposed to be. And when you apologize and ask to be forgiven, a leader, doing that is it's amazing. So those are really simple things, but what I'm really looking for in my life is integration. And you said whole. What I would say is that I am a whole person. I am, there's everything here that is supposed to be here. The problem is that what is inside of me is often not integrated with what I'm portraying to the people around me. And prior to recovery, I had the outside me, which is what everybody saw. And I was very careful and I curated that very carefully and spent an enormous amount of time and effort worrying about what people saw, what people thought of me. And then there was the inside of me, and I couldn't tell anybody what was inside of me because it would have blown the whole thing up. And so I had to deal with it all by myself. So now what I want to do is first of all, I want to be honest about what's inside of me with the people who can help me, my therapist, my spiritual advisor, my coach, my family, my best friends. Transparency, vulnerability isn't telling everybody in the world everything about you and everything that's happened, but it's being willing to tell the right people the things. And so I do that. I do that on a daily basis so that the stuff inside of me has a place to be and a way for me to work on it. And then I want the outside of me to match the person I want to be inside. I want to integrate those two. I want there to be very little difference between who I claim to be internally in my mind and heart and spirit, and who and how people perceive me. And that is very important. People don't experience your intent. They experience how you make them feel. And so my goal, I don't care, Scott, what you think of me. I care how I make you feel. It doesn't mean I don't value your opinion in some way, but your opinion doesn't establish my value. What you think about me doesn't establish my value. My value is internal and doesn't change. What I do doesn't make my value change. What you think about me doesn't make my value change. But as a human being designed and created to be in community, the most important part of community is how do I make you feel? And that's my responsibility. And you don't feel the way I intended you to feel, you just feel the way you feel. And so if I'm not making you feel valued and cared for and respected, I need to change. I need to find out what that's going to mean for you, which mostly just starts with me being curious about you and finding out who you are and how you see the world and how you see other people. Because if I start overlaying what I think about the world on top of you, I will be wrong every single time. And that's really difficult for leaders. Leaders are used to being in the position where everybody thinks you're supposed to know everything and you're supposed to have a solution and you're supposed to know where we're going. There's a truth, there is some truth there. Obviously, leaders have to have vision and have to make those decisions, but I don't have to be right all the time. I'm surrounded by people who are fabulous. And they're going to be right. And I need to let them be right. I need to ask them questions. I need to say, hey, we're facing something here, and I'm not sure I know what the right thing to do is. What are you thinking about? This. That's unbelievably empowering in an organization. And we're back to talking about leadership and less about personal integration. But integrity and integration come from the same word. It is that we are throughout our throughout, if you cut slices of me, you find the same thing in all the slices. I'm integrated. I'm I have integrity. And so that's what I'm that's what I'm searching for. I'm not even sure I use the word whole or wholeness very much. It gets overused. I'm getting to the point where I don't use culture very much. I want to talk about experience. Everybody knows what experience means. They experience things, right? And I have a whole track on language. I think we really have problems with language. We use words that communicate things that aren't true, and we use words that put people in positions they don't want to be in. And but that's a whole nother day.

Scott Allen 24:37

Aaron Powell But for listeners, and this is why I love having a conversation with Thomas, because he's a critical thinker. And I always walk away from our conversations thinking about things in a little bit of a different way. And I think, as I always say in my workshops, it's my friend Tony Middlebrook's, I don't know better, I know different. And I think it's through these conversations that we all come to better understandings of ourselves and we come to a better understanding of this. But I think I I want to uh move back to this notion of vulnerability. I think when a leader, and as you know better than anyone, when you're navigating complexity, and that could be your children, that could be yourself, that could be like a complex challenge at Kim Ray, no one has the answer. And so to it's almost freeing in a way to model that vulnerability and create that psychological safety, create that space where we can have the conversation and then uh chart what we think is the best the chart what we think is the best path forward. Because no one has the answer. That vulnerability, I think, can be so freeing on a number of levels. Because to your point, I think a lot of leaders are walking around Earth right now putting that pressure on themselves that they have to have the answer, that they're supposed to have the answer. That's what a leader is, is the person who has the answers. That's a tough place to be.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Yeah, I would even go I would even go so far as to say that you can make a case that leadership isn't about knowing what to do. Yeah. You can hire people who know what to do. I lead a fairly significant organization with a lot of complexity. And I'm a pretty smart guy, and I read a lot and think a lot, and I don't sleep. So I I can stay pretty current on a lot of things. But Scott, there's no way I'm human. I am just a human being. I'm not at a supercomputer. There's no way I can know enough about everything that's going on at Kim Ray to make all the decisions and to know whether everything's right. And on a spectral continuum, as it were, on one end is you don't know anything, and on the one other end you know everything. And obviously a leader doesn't need to be in either one of those places. We need to be somewhere in the middle and know enough that we know that our people are doing fundamentally the right things. But at the end of the day, I'm going to make the claim that leadership is not about knowing what to do. Leadership is about developing people so that they know what to do and are empowered to do it. And if you build the right team, you can accomplish anything. No one person can do much of anything by themselves. And so our actual role, which we I don't see played out in a lot of places where people call themselves leaders, our actual role is not to establish exactly what's going to happen next, but to create a team who can figure out what the right next thing to do is and accomplish it because you're there to support them and develop them. And if we work on that, that the other thing is we're always people seem to be very interested in growth. Well, if you want real growth, get out of the way. Everything that they have to come to you for. So I'm the CEO. Every decision that I'm the only one that can make is a bottleneck for the organization. It limits growth, keeps us from growing in a particular direction. So my goal as the CEO of Chemray is to completely and absolutely get to the point where nothing has to cross my desk from a decision-making, a tactical standpoint. And I get to spend all of my time working on team development and people development and communicating the principle that we're working on, not the tactical, right? So who are we, not what are we going to do today? And if I do that and do that well and surround myself with amazing people, which by the way, you can't attract amazing people if you keep everything for yourself and take all the credit and make all the decisions. Nobody who's any good at anything wants to work for somebody like that, right? So you automatically run everybody off. You it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? I'm the only one who can do anything in this company. I'm the only one who knows anything. That will be true very shortly because everybody who's any good will leave you. And so if you're willing to let people have autonomy and have power, they will do great work if you support them and believe in them. They will make mistakes. But I make mistakes too. There we are. It's not like I would be perfect.

Scott Allen 29:03

No. I have this, I have a book idea for you, and I want you to put your critical mind to this. And for listeners, there's no research behind any of what I'm about to say. But I have this book idea in my head, and it's called the three-month rule. And of course, there's again no research behind three months. But I think what you're talking about, which I really love, is are you creating the environment and are you are you designing the space for what you just said to emerge? If the organization is so dependent on you, and I work with some leaders where they don't feel like they can leave for a day, they don't feel like they can leave for a week, they don't feel like, oh my gosh, a two-week vacation? Heck no. I don't think you're doing it right. I don't think that's leadership. I think that's just uh busyness. And you're not building and designing a system that can exist and that's sustainable beyond you. So I always challenge some of the leaders that I'm working with. You can stress test and you can see if you've built the system or not. Can you leave for a week and things hum along? Can you leave for two weeks and things hum along? And I think what you're talking about here is building that system and creating the conditions for that to be built. And then freeing you up to focus on, or an individual up to focus on some of those really important things that whether that's carrying the message and embodying the values of who we are and what we stand for and who we want to be, I love it. I think it's awesome.

Vacation Rules, Sabbaticals, And Employee Ownership

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yeah, there's a aphorism that says, do what only you can do. And so many leaders are doing what a lot of other people can do. And it is busyness and it makes them feel good, it makes them feel important. And I've run into a lot of leaders in my life who I think thrive on the fact that, oh man, if I take an afternoon off, my phone will ring off the hook. If I leave the office, then everybody just panics and freaks out. So we have a rule at Kimray. All of our executives are required to take their vacation, all of it, and they get a significant amount. And I really, it's not a hard rule, I'm not going to force them, but I really want them to take it at least two weeks at a time. I want them to be off for two weeks. If you're on vacation from Kim Ray and you're an executive, we don't communicate with you, and you're not supposed to communicate with us. Now, obviously, every once in a while that happens, but generally speaking, we just don't. We let them go do their thing and we don't call them and they don't call us, they don't check in. And my goal is for the senior executives, that would be me and the other officers, to be able to take off one or two months. I'm working on a sabbatical concept for Kimray. Sabbaticals are not as common in the for-profit corporate world, but they do exist. But that's exactly my goal. And I I can't, I couldn't do it this spring because we are in the middle of a project that I am doing what only I can do. I'm driving the company to be 100% employee-owned by the end of April, I hope. So this spring was not a good time for me to not be around and do the thing that I'm the only one who can do. But my goal is next spring I intend to take two months and go hike part of the AT. And I will not be in communication. I'm not even sure I'll have a cell phone with me for weeks at a time. And Kimry will be absolutely fine without me. They won't be fine maybe for five years without me, right? Because my job is to continue to communicate and provide vision. But they do not need me to run the business day to day. In fact, they don't need me to run the business week to week or even month to month. Everything will be just fine without me here. So that should be your goal if you're a high-level leader for sure.

Scott Allen 32:39

Okay. Maybe one or two other things when you use the word integration. Are there other the steps you mentioned that uh you mentioned that you have some resources, some individuals that you turn to as thinking partners, which is wonderful. Any other elements of kind of your recipe for feeling that sense of integration, feeling integrated that listeners might be interested in?

SPEAKER_01 33:03

I journal a lot. I write a lot. Some of it makes it out into the public sphere. I produce a Monday Muse thing that I put out and I write a I communicate a lot through writing here at Kimray. But most of my writing never sees the light of day. It's a way for me to process internal emotions and thoughts. There is something. I'm not, I didn't make this up, lots of research. If you look it up, there's something about putting uh pen or pencil to paper and actually writing the words and writing the letters and those things. It concerns me. I don't I am a tech freak. I love the newest thing. I'm deeply involved in AI. I've got agentic AI working for me. I'm creating my own stuff. I love it all, but it all comes with potential issues. And one of the issues that I have with everything being digital is we've stopped writing. I and I think that's a bad thing. I think there is a physical mental connection that happens. So I write a lot and I encourage the people that I mentor and I coach to write. Get a notebook. I'm not talking about today I got up and had breakfast, and then I'm not talking about the dear diary. I'm talking about stream of consciousness, your shopping lists, something that occurred to you that was funny, anything, everything. It's a processing kind of thing to do. So I do that a lot. That's really huge for me. I read a lot, or in some cases, listen to books a lot. As you said, I think that especially for leaders, it's very easy to end up in a echo chamber or in a bubble. The people around you tend to want to tell you things that they think you want to hear or that you will enjoy hearing because they don't want. It's very hard to create an environment where people will tell you the absolute hard, cold truth. If you can find a few of those people that will do that for you, you're doing really well. A lot of people are going to fix the thing a little bit. And so I like to read and listen to people that I disagree with. And then my practice is what can I learn from this person, even though I don't believe what they believe, or even though I don't agree with the decision the way they've ch chosen to see this. That's an exercise to keep my brain from just narrowing down. And that's another problem. You're a little younger than I am, but those of us that are getting old, and a natural consequence of aging is we narrow our viewpoints, continue to narrow until we're fixed.

Scott Allen 35:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

That doesn't have to happen. It will happen if you don't do something about it. And I think one of the greatest ways to do that is to really just be open to listening to and reading and discussing with people who disagree with you, that I would not pick this person to be like my confidant, but I want to hear what they have to say. I want to ask myself, what could I learn here? What is true about what they're saying, even if I don't agree with everything? I think those are all really good things for leaders to do, but they're actually really good things for anybody to do. Oh, yeah. I don't know if that was what you were looking for, but no, for sure.

Scott Allen 36:07

Again, you have the steps. And I didn't know that you have your faith, right? I think that that would be another element that that's anchoring you. There's an element of vulnerability here that I can't have all the answers. I don't have the answers, I make mistakes, I've made mistakes, and that helps you be a more integrated version of yourself. There is the curiosity of exploring content, sometimes content that is is the antithesis of maybe what you believe or individuals. And there's a process of journaling, of making sense of your own. And I love in the book, the Monday Musins are throughout the book for listeners. There's a link in the show notes to the book, but those are throughout the book. And I and it'll give listeners a nice kind of example of what your process is. And so I think for each one of us, uh if you put an individual who is struggling in some way in a position of authority, adventures ensue. And if I think if we're a parent, if we're a coach, if we're a teacher, if we're a manager, if we're a leader, however, if we're in a position of authority, are you the best possible version of you? And I think for each one of us who are engaged in this conversation, this work, it's a little bit of a different recipe. It's maybe not the same for me as it is you for sure. But do we have that system in place? Do we do we have that and as an anchor and as a grounding to be the best possible version of ourselves?

SPEAKER_01 37:39

Absolutely. I would throw one more thing on there that I think is really important is becoming more important. We are inundated with information and noise. The world's just very noisy.

Scott Allen 37:50

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 37:51

And we have to, I have to, I'm not going to tell anybody else what they have to do, but I have to intentionally find time to unplug, just for lack of a better term. No phone, no, I'm not listening to anything. I'm not the news isn't on, I'm not doom scrolling, whatever people do. For me, that's walking, which I also think physical movement and exercise. I know some people are addicted to exercise, that's a whole nother problem, but uh we all need to move. And so just getting out and walking and not taking a phone or an iPod or whatever, and just letting your mind wander and living in that silence without the reverb chamber. And some people are really uncomfortable with silence. Some people are really uncomfortable with not doing something that is quote unquote productive. But it's amazing to me what comes to mind and the things that I can work through when I don't have all this other input coming at me all the time. Now, I tell you that, and it makes me sound like I'm really this highly developed person who has all these wonderful routines. But if you come to my house most evenings, because my kids are all grown and gone, and so I don't have the problem of needing to be present for my children at home anymore, and my wife has her own thing most of the time, you will find me sitting in a chair with the television on, sometimes with the sound off, and music playing, and I'm writing or working because I do have all of these different voices in my head, and I have to give them something to do so that I can focus on what I'm working on. So I have problems. I'm just gonna tell you right now, I have some serious issues that I'm still working through. But those walks, as many days that I can, my goal is to walk every day. I don't make it every day, but my goal is to walk every day, and that's a 30 or 40 minutes of quiet and contemplation and not being inundated, or it's important. It's important.

Scott Allen 39:43

Yeah. Well, and when when you get on the Appalachian Trail, that's it's gonna be quiet. You kind of have to have your ears open.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

I plan to take a guy with me though that tends to talk a lot. So I'm not gonna have to talk very much. I'm just gonna listen to him.

Practical Wisdom And Final Takeaway

Scott Allen 39:58

Oh Thomas, I really appreciate your time today. And just a fun conversation. And uh for listeners, there is there are links in the show notes that I want you to explore. And please click on this book and buy it. It's just again, one of those leadership books that has stood out for me in a sea of books about the topic because of its authenticity and its vulnerability, and I think the reality of what a number of people out there in the world are experiencing or not admitting that they're experiencing. And so I very much appreciate that, sir. I always end the conversation by saying, what's the practical wisdom here? What's the practical wisdom in our conversation today, Thomas?

SPEAKER_01 40:45

I think that the practical wisdom is that the world tells us that leadership is lonely and that we have to know all the answers, and we have to be something that I don't think people are created to be. And so my encouragement to leaders would be to acknowledge your humanity. My therapist says I need to be a human being, not a human doing. Be a human being. Let other people know that you're a human being, and ask for help. Ask for people to support the things that you need support, and they will appreciate that and they will value you for that. I think that's the maybe the starting point for a lot of leaders who are stuck would just be to acknowledge that they cannot do this by themselves and they're not nobody's asking them to. They that's something that we've put on ourselves. So just raise your hand and say, Hey, I could use some help. We're here. We'll help you.

Scott Allen 41:41

Love it. Okay, sir. We'll do it again. I really appreciate you.