Leading Dream Jobs in Aerospace with Celeste Ford and Janet Grondin

Join us as we talk to Celeste Ford, board chair and founder of Stellar Solutions, and Janet Grondin, CEO of Stellar Solutions, about leadership transitions, aerospace, connecting the dots and creating dream jobs.

Show Notes:
(7:30) After the leaders introduce their stories, we talk about creating a long-time vision. Janet and Celeste share Stellar Solutions’ vision to satisfy customer critical needs while realizing your dream job, and they break down what that means to them. Janet and Celeste share how the landscape in aerospace has changed – that the money is no longer all from government and how that has required more connecting of the dots across the industry.

(13:30) Next, we talk about creating dream jobs and how they know they have succeeded. We get to talk about the Baldrige framework; Janet and Celeste’s actionable advice and their secret sauce – hint it’s about including everyone!

(20:55) Culture – the leaders share how they create something bigger than themselves, develop a team living the culture and how they provide 9 weeks of paid time off!

(28:15) Janet and Celeste share breakthroughs on remote work to keep everyone connected (no one size fits all!) and leaning into the big concept of deployment.

(33:25) Part 1 of the conversation wraps up with one piece of advice from Janet and Celeste but there is plenty more coming your way next episode when we talk to them more.

About Celeste: She founded Stellar Solutions in 1995 and served as CEO until 2018 with the mission to deliver high-impact performance for defense, intelligence, commercial, civil and international clients. She established Stellar Solutions Foundation in 1998, QuakeFinder humanitarian R&D program in 2001, and expanded Stellar’s global presence. She launched Stellar Ventures in 2022 to invest in the next generation of space technology companies. Celeste is Board Chair and Founder of Stellar Solutions, Inc., a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award-winning aerospace engineering company. She is Managing Director at Stellar Ventures.

About Janet: She is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Stellar Solutions Inc., a small, woman-owned business and leading provider of high-impact engineering services to significant intelligence, defense, civil, commercial, and international customers for the past 29 years. Prior to this role, she served as Vice President for Intelligence Programs, Vice President, Defense Programs and Director of Emerging Space Capabilities. Janet is a former Northrop Grumman Director and a retired USAF Colonel with 30+ years of experience in navigation, remote sensing, satellite communications, launch, space superiority, and launch ranges.

Resources:
www.stellarsolutions.com

https://baldrigefoundation.org

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome everybody to the Seasons Leadership Podcast, where we are committed to leaders everywhere, at all levels, who want to make progress on their leadership journey. We will bring you actionable advice to improve your leadership and life today.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Thank you for joining us At Seasons Leadership. We share a vision to make excellent leadership the world-wide standard. Learn more at seasonsleLeadershipcom.

Speaker 1: 0:27

Welcome everybody to the Seasons Leadership Podcast. We have two great guests with us today, Celeste Ford and Janet Brondon, and we're going to have some great conversations. In fact, this is probably going to be two podcasts worth. So you're going to see that we'll break off at some point and pick back up again with these two amazing women, and so let's get started. I'm going to start with Celeste. Celeste, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 3: 0:58

Sure. Well, I'm always asked because there's not that many women in aerospace like, how did I get into aerospace in the first place? So I happened to have a high school that was really good in math and science, and it was a public school. So as you start looking for college, everyone says, well, you should be an engineer. And I didn't know what that was. I had no engineers in my family and the more I asked engineers to describe what they could do, I didn't really still understand what an engineer was. But as I went through the college catalogs because we didn't have Internet back then I saw aerospace at the top and I said, wow, I'd really like to go to college and learn something new. And aerospace is not anything that was covered in any way, shape or form in high school at the time. Now, fortunately, it is, and so I went into aerospace.

Speaker 3: 1:52

I went to Notre Dame and then Stanford, and then I had three jobs where I worked for others one in the international commercial, one in defense and one that was somewhat of a startup and each I learned something new. First the technical what it takes to, you know, do an aerospace project. Then about leadership, because I was working with Air Force people. And then on the third, all the contract kind of things. And armed with those three job experiences, I decided to start my own company, stellar Solutions, and focus on really just the high impact.

Speaker 3: 2:32

Things Didn't want to be the next ginormous company. I wanted this to be a place where all the superstars in the industry could come and solve all the really tough problems that were out there. So that was my path to starting Stellar Solutions. And I was a mom at the time, so I'll have to say the mom factor probably played in you know kind of my generation. It wasn't expected that women worked, and so I felt if I'm going to work every day, it better be for something important. So I think that was also an underlying theme in my choices as I went on. And then, after gosh almost 25 years of Stellar Solutions I transitioned to board chair, started angel investing and then started a venture fund, stellar Ventures, which I'm deeply immersed in right now. So it's been a perfect next chapter to help the next generation of engineers. And with that segue, of course, I couldn't be spending all the time doing that if I didn't have a stellar CEO running everything at Stellar Solutions, and that would be Janet.

Speaker 1: 3:41

That's a great transition. Janet, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 4: 3:45

Well, thankseste, and Debbie and Susan, thanks for having us on today. So for me, I did grow up in an engineering family. My dad was an engineer. I grew up in the in the midwest and played baseball and softball, basketball, was kind of a sports kid and you know, kind of got to the end of high school and decided I'd probably better figure out what I'm going to do for my career and the Air Force was kind of calling me a little bit and so I looked into it and eventually ended up on an ROTC scholarship at Embry-Riddle. My dad was a private pilot and in fact he built his own plane, his own Starduster II, in our garage while I was growing up.

Speaker 4: 4:31

So I kind of had the bug, the aviation bug a bit, and went to Embry-Riddle in Prescott, arizona, as an aeronautical engineer and was commissioned in the Air Force in 1989. We had a short stint in pilot training. That wasn't for me. I really I think my mind once I got into the engineering realm, you know I I that's what I wanted to do, and so I ended up spending about 26 years in the Air Force doing various engineering jobs, program management jobs. Most of that time was in space so, and most of that time was in what we now call the Space Force. So when I was going through the Air Force we had a kind of a small group of folks that really focused on, you know, gps and launch and military satellite communications infrared. You know GPS and launch and military satellite communications infrared. You know, missile warning, so all of those kind of more or less traditional or legacy, legacy missions. And that group is what is now called the Space Force.

Speaker 4: 5:38

But I retired before, before the Space Force came into being. But all of those guys are my friends now. So you know I work on contracts, we work on contracts for them now. But after the Air Force I went to Northrop Grumman.

Speaker 4: 5:52

I was a director in overhead persistent infrared for about three years and that's when I decided I would like to make a change and join all those great people that Celeste was talking about and I came to Stellar and it just really was a perfect fit for me. You know I got to work the mission but also work with, you know, phenomenal people, and so after a year or so I became a director and then a VP and then a CEO about a little over two years ago. So you know we're all about solving customer critical needs while we realize our dream job. That's the vision that Celeste had when she started the company, that's how she ran it and that's how I run it, and it's a phenomenal place to be, and I like to say I'm in a job I never dreamed of, so which is maybe a level beyond having your dream job.

Speaker 4: 6:51

So I like that that's right. So that's the the end of the story for now, I guess well, we're in the middle of the story.

Speaker 1: 7:02

we're going going to pick up, that's right.

Speaker 4: 7:03

That's right. I'm still living this story.

Speaker 2: 7:06

I know I just have to say this is, you know, hearing you two talk about this. You know, debbie and I came from aerospace too. But boy, oh boy, you sound like you're doing some really great things. It's like you know, if, if we had a couple hours, I'd love to know even more about all what you're doing. It's just, it's exciting, it's exciting work.

Speaker 3: 7:30

And it's sustaining because we've been doing it now for a long time. But, as Janet pointed out, our vision hasn't changed and that's to satisfy our customer critical needs while realizing our dream jobs. So it has to be a critical need. It's not going to be writing a document that no one ever reads just for the revenue of it, and it has to be a dream job, or bring someone in whose dream job it is, because if you wake up in the morning and you love what you're doing, you're going to do a good job and it's on something important. You know it doesn't get better than that, so the rest takes care of itself. The finances are your rear view mirror, but if you get the customer critical need and dream job and the right people, the rest takes care of itself.

Speaker 1: 8:17

One of the things we often ask our guests on a podcast is what are you passionate about? And it sounds like you, ladies, are already answering that question You're passionate about aerospace, space, customer critical needs and dream jobs. But what else would you add to that that you're passionate about?

Speaker 3: 8:36

Well, for me, I've got a new passion, which is a spin out of stellar solutions, which is a spin out of Stellar Solutions, which is Stellar Ventures, and I think why I'm passionate about that is pretty much all of my career, until the very end.

Speaker 3: 8:51

All of space was funded by the government and granted it's different government agencies and one thing we always describe Stellar to make it easier to understand is the five points of the star commercial, international, defense, civil and intelligence. So those five buckets of people do space projects but they're very different from each other. Intelligences, spy satellites and those agencies defenses, your military support to your military operations. Civil, nasa, go to Mars, that sort of thing. Commercial, you know, like Starlink and international, because hey, we're not the only ones in the US building satellites and doing cool things. So, armed with that framework at Stellar where you're working on all those projects, and with, again, a framework of that, we cross boundaries. So there might be something super interesting and commercial that you could do in intelligence and we as system engineers do that.

Speaker 3: 9:55

So we grew up, but, as you you know, those four points of the star three are pretty much government, and international can be too, and really that was where all the money was for space. But now we've transitioned to a time where there's hundreds of billions of venture dollars going into space and really good ideas and almost the peer pressure of college of you should start a business, not go to work for someone pulling at all our recent grads, so raising a venture fund where we can actually look at those, and I again have to give kudos to Janet and her team, because without their support we would not be investing as smartly as we are. We actually go to Stellar Solutions for due diligence, for deal flow and to help connect our entrepreneurs to government customers that they may not know about, so that's been value added and differentiate for our fund, and so my passion is really connecting those job dots, and Janet's a big. Janet and her Stellar team are a big part of that as well.

Speaker 4: 11:04

That's a great place to leave off, because. So what I'm really passionate about you know, the culture of the organization that Celeste built is really unique in our industry to be able to come in and work on your dream job, job, and so where my head is at and what I'm really passionate about is taking advantage of the growth that is out there that Celeste was talking about. We've got some amazing talented people that are doing amazing things today and projecting out into the future. Well, what skills do we need to have to participate in the environment? You know 10, the industry 10 years from now. You know, I think I kind of liken it to launch. You know, I would say 15 years ago, before SpaceX started really launching.

Speaker 4: 11:59

At the rate they've been launching lately and returning their boosters to Earth and all these other things lately, and returning their boosters to earth and all these other things, um, there are a lot of folks would say you know, launch will never change, it'll never get cheaper.

Speaker 4: 12:10

You know there's a limit and it's going to always be expensive. Well, spacex proved that wrong and, um, and our and a lot of things have changed. You know, suddenly we do have an environment now where entrepreneurs can come in out of college, have a good idea, get it funded. They don't need the kind of money that you needed 15, 20 years ago. You really needed a lot of government money to get started, and now you can get started with venture and private capital. I think everybody still needs a government contract here and there. It never hurts but those are the kind of jobs that are presenting themselves tough problems, interesting problems, and so I'm really passionate about helping the stellar team prepare for, you know, execute today, but prepare for tomorrow so that we have all the right tools, the right capabilities, you know, and the right, the right environment to succeed.

Speaker 2: 13:10

you know in that in that timeframe, yeah, I just get so many questions are piling up in my mind but I want to go back to about this dream job and so I mean, I know this is a crazy question, but because it's so much part of your vision, how do you know that you're hitting that Like? Do you measure it? Do you ask people? Is it? How do you know that you are actually? You know people actually are there and experiencing their dream jobs actually are there and experiencing their dream jobs.

Speaker 3: 13:51

Well, since this is a podcast on leadership, we've kind of given you the details without backing up to how we lead.

Speaker 3: 13:56

And I think well, of course mentioned since I met Debbie through the Baldrige National Quality Program, that that is a framework that I used for stellar solutions and then our leadership team picked it up. We really did it for internal purposes and then went external to be evaluated. But I feel like, as a founder, everything I did was how I did it right and there was no you know and, of course, if I did it, I thought it was a good idea. So that was that. Well, as you grow, you need to adjust and the Baldrige framework has processes but your metrics? So how do you know you're good? And one of those is the dream job, and same with customer critical needs. So the most direct ways and Janet can talk more of the details is you ask them and you compile that data and you look at it and you have accountability and I think you know that's one framework. The other is actually having that vision. You know so as someone who comes at Stellar. It's very clear Dream job, critical needs is the framework. Baldrige is your processes and metrics that support that and then that you evaluate it.

Speaker 3: 15:15

And I also say and this is where I really just applaud Janet is you also have to lead by example. This isn't just like some paperwork exercise or some pasty on the wall, lovey-dovey, saying that nobody gets. This is like you have to lead by example. And for us, you don't know the customer critical needs and unless you really talk to them, and you don't know a person's dream job unless you talk to them, and so we have important metrics around customer visits which people see see Janet do, it's not just for others and same with the employee and team relationships. So I think that's really how, on the big picture sense and Janet can probably talk more about what she's done with that framework to make it all hum with. You know 300 people instead of you know what I started with three.

Speaker 4: 16:13

Yeah, I mean that's a great way to tee it up. I think we have leaned on Baldrige quite a bit in this process because you know, early on I think it was ask and you have a survey and your dream job yes or no. Over time we've learned that even the concept of dream job has changed right. So in the 80s and 90s it was kind of like oh, I'm going to work, work, work, and then, before I retire, I get my dream job. And really, you know, things are moving so fast right now that you know we get young people in and even mid-career people come in and they're like well, I have a dream job and it's going to last for about two years and then I'm going to have another one and that. So we've had to adjust a little bit and realize that you know the surveys alone that will give us one piece of information.

Speaker 4: 17:02

But what we've had to sort of implement is more of a and we all along you know Celeste implemented monthly touches with our employees and that is something that we do and we measure and we keep track of. But now what we do is we try to have more of like a dream job journey discussion about. Okay, here's where you are in your in, you know, in your development what do you want to do next? And let's start looking for that opportunity. You know so, because what we found is, if we don't do that, then sometimes people say, well, I'm done with this dream job. And then they start looking outside the company. It's like, well, there's no reason to do that we can. Our whole purpose in life is to find you your next dream job.

Speaker 4: 17:43

And so I think, as a leadership team, we've really embraced the idea of having, you know, ongoing discussions with our employees. And then, you know, you sort of add that piece along with the strategic plan, which is something that every employee contributes to. So at Stellar, you know, we do have a vision of what the future is going to look like and what's going to happen in Cislunar and how we can participate and all that. But at the end of the day, when we decide what kind of work we're going after, we ask everybody, you know, where should we go next?

Speaker 4: 18:23

Where do you want to go? What's your next dream job? And then we, you know, you know, kind of sift through all the inputs and then we'll pick some projects and we'll we'll go after those, along with the employees who are interested in that, and it can take a while to go find those new projects, but we stick with it and eventually, you know, we find those dream jobs. So so that's a long way of saying, yes, we measure it, but there's a lot more to it than just measuring. It's really, you know, having a deep relationship with your employees and and committing to you know the vision and carrying it out.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Yeah, that's great, janet, because I know one of the questions you had asked us to prepare for was actionable advice. So I was holding back on that strategic plan, but Janet teed it up nicely. That is really. I think our secret sauce is that we really do include everyone on the strategic planning process and we tie it to individual bonus plans planning process and we tie it to individual bonus plans. So I feel like there is no ivory tower with a strategic plan that's decoupled from the working people, which is what I saw at the former companies where I work. Instead, it's very dynamic.

Speaker 3: 19:43

You have a bonus plan, we have a strategic plan. Somewhere in the company there's someone accountable for pursuing these goals and they came from grassroots and they came from the people who are on the front line. So of course they know our current customer critical needs and then they participate in the brainstorming of gee. We've got our current customers but like that's, this lunar stuff is coming down the pike. Who do we talk to to get that? And in Baldrick speak, we call goal one our current customers right size, right scope and goal to our future customers. And we have the plan, but it also ties to individual bonus plans and then these monthly touches with customers and our people are what Janet has a leadership meeting and they talk about how to close. We call it a convergence meeting because we found we were doing a lot of this and we needed to do this a little more. And she's added all sorts of things that have, you know, really made the accountability crisper, and that's, I think, the fundamental thing that we do differently. That's important.

Speaker 1: 20:50

I love that. Um, Janet, you mentioned earlier you talked, touched a little bit on the culture, and what I'm really curious about is your feelings about leadership's role in the culture, the CEO's role in the culture.

Speaker 4: 21:07

Well, I think the CEO owns it right, I think there's no question about it. You know, my view of the culture is you can work a lot of places and right now in aerospace, for an employee it's an employee driven, you know, relationship between employee and employer, and so the differentiator for a lot of people is some people is money right, and you know, and that's not the set, that um that I think we really attracted at Stellar, um, it's really about are you part of something bigger than yourself? Um, do you? When you come to work, are you respected? Can you be heard? Are you included? Do you belong? Do you feel like you belong? Do people care about you? And can you trust the other people around you?

Speaker 4: 22:03

And I don't mean like trust in a deep integrity kind of way, but are people basically, are going to do what they say they're going to do? These are the kinds of, you know, basic cultural attributes that I ask all of my leadership to really think about every day and practice every day and really set the tone for the entire company. And when we do that, I think it builds on itself because, you know, people feel included, they want to be here, they want to come to work, not just to do their dream job and to solve the customer critical need, but also to be with people that they trust and respect and like to work with, and there's nothing better than that right working your dream job, part of a mission that's bigger than yourself, and you're working with a bunch of people that you want to be around, um, so that's what we're you know what, what Celeste built, and as we grow, we're um really fighting hard to not only I wouldn't say keep that culture. I would say expand and grow that culture um into into the next generation.

Speaker 2: 23:14

So, um, so yeah, I absolutely think the ceo owns it so I have a question, as you were talking about that, um, I mean, it sounds like a place I would love to work. You know, I think you would. Yes, it just it hits everything as the CEO is there. Are you running up against challenges to that Like, is that hard to have that culture?

Speaker 4: 23:41

Oh, absolutely, yeah, absolutely it's. You know it's. I would say the challenges are, for example, we have a number of unique benefits. We have nine weeks of time off, paid time off. That's incredibly generous. For example, when you have that kind of generous benefits, you know at times you also have to.

Speaker 4: 24:16

You know people want to be able to do something specifically unique. You can't always do everything that's unique to every person, right? So as we grow like we used to be able to do a lot more unique things early on, now we're not able to do quite as many, but we're. But what we do is we step back and go okay, what do we really care about? Nine weeks of paid time off is something we really care about, right. We have a very generous profit sharing plan, for example, and same there. You know, as we grow, we have some folks in the company who would like to have a little more cash than a little less retirement put away, right. So these are things that you can't please everybody, because you know some part of your population wants more retirement put away and whatnot. We do, we work through all of these things and really try to keep in mind the entire population. What's unique about Stellar, and how to make sure that everybody feels valued and included and and has a voice in where we go.

Speaker 3: 25:28

So no, it's not easy, but it's a challenge and it's a, I would say, a labor of love. You know so and it's a, I would say, a labor of love. You know so. And in the early days when I started Stellar, I remember thinking, well, why would anyone leave? Because if you want to work on something new, we have a process and you can do that and you know if you're any good, of course the customer will say yes, you know, it seemed very straightforward to me that no one should ever leave, because you can always, in the strategic planning process, work towards aligning your current or future dream job into customer visits and tangible things.

Speaker 3: 26:00

But as you get, you know, closer to 300, not everyone has that skill set, not every program makes sense. So there, there are going to be some deviations. But I'd say the core culture that Janet was describing, that you're cared about and that we're doing great things together as a team, you know, still is there. I always used to say, you know that, saying that every company, there's 20% of the people doing 80% of the work, and I always said about Stellar we're the 20%.

Speaker 3: 26:34

We don't have to worry like if you're at a Christmas party or something that you're sitting next to one of those people.

Speaker 4: 26:40

That doesn't carry a load you know.

Speaker 3: 26:42

So I think that that's another metric of our Stellar culture.

Speaker 4: 26:46

It's true. Yeah, I was going to do one. Go back on the challenge too. You know, one of the things that we find, especially after the pandemic, you know a lot of. We used to have more people in the office. Now many of our employees are working from home and, and they're so, they're working remote.

Speaker 4: 27:08

And I think the biggest challenge we're kind of looking at right now is okay, how are we communicating, how are people understanding and experiencing the culture? Because we're having to shift our mindset in the leadership ranks to realize that if you're at home on a machine, it's probably a completely different experience than if you're in the office with 20 other stellar people. And so how do we make sure that every employee is able to participate and really see the culture? So that's, I would say that's probably right now, one of the things that we're really wrestling with. But, but we're getting there. You know, once you, you know you use the Baldrige kind of mindset, right, you take in feedback and you kind of look at what your results, you're trying to achieve, and then you kind of go through the problem solving process together and figure out all right, what are we going to do about this, and so, so that's something that we routinely do, and this year we are looking specifically at communication.

Speaker 2: 28:12

For that reason, so I have to ask because you're not the only one struggling with this remote how to keep people engaged and connected. Have you had any breakthroughs?

Speaker 4: 28:26

I would say that we have relied on some in-person meetings that were always on the calendar. We get together as a company every year. This is something that, Celeste, I know you've done probably since year three or four right Year one Year one.

Speaker 3: 28:43

We had an annual meeting. It was part of the vision.

Speaker 4: 28:47

And we still do it. We just had our annual meeting in March here in DC, where I'm at, and we had, you know, well over 200 employees join us with their plus ones some spouses, some moms, some kids strategic plan, um, and we reconnect. You know, as a team we do some fun things. We we had a party at the national history museum. All that was really fun, um, but that's kind of a uh, a tried and true uh thing that we do. And then we always have um summer or fall meetings where we get together in different regions and similarly, we get the kind of a geographical group together every year. So we've leaned on those and that's definitely worked for us.

Speaker 4: 29:37

In addition, we've added things like what we call stellar talks. So somebody in the company maybe they're an amateur astronomer they come in and they'll do a little TED Talk-like thing, talk for about 10 minutes about, you know, what they know, and then they take questions from the rest of the team. So we've done some of those, which have been been really good, and we've just tried, you know, various new ways of communicating and a lot of one on one. So we have, you know, really doubled down in the pandemic and since making sure, you know, really doubled down in the pandemic and since, making sure that we're really following up, having meaningful conversations.

Speaker 4: 30:16

So have we broken the code? I'd say no. You know there's more code to be broken, but you know what? What I find is we really relied on on Baldrige during this whole timeframe because we already had our processes in place, we already had our metrics in place and we were able to see where we were dropping off. And then we would sort of go back and say, well, how did we intend to do this in the first place and are we doing it? And then a lot of times it just was a minor shift and a little bit more emphasis on. You know, instead of emailing your employees once a month, you actually call them or do a team's call or take them out for happy hours, that kind of thing. So it's a lot of a lot more touch. I think is probably the main thing that we've changed.

Speaker 3: 31:05

And it's touched with a purpose that reinforces the culture. Like the very first year when we had our annual strategic planning meeting, there were six of us at a table creating the strategic plan in real time, before the end of the year, so that people can participate in these various in-person and teams meetings to get their input and to get that really all in place. And then in the summer fall mid mid-course correction meetings you can, you know, focus on the hood that you live in.

Speaker 3: 31:45

You know there's a NASA guy down the street from my super secret thing, but that sounds kind of cool and you can just get to know each other better, which I just think is better face to face. And then the one on ones that are not optional, with the leaders and their teams, reinforces that. But honestly, there's no one size fits all. We say that you know that about our benefits and everything. There just isn't a one size fits all, because a story for why someone's working at home or why they don't, it varies and you can't just say, well, there's one way to do that or not.

Speaker 3: 32:21

We all found creative things to do during COVID, like the videos that Janet was talking about, and also she's created these town hall meetings. So not only do you have the technical space talks, you have town halls where people can learn more about the business operations, kind of questions they might have. And one aha again I have to credit Baldrige is we had all these approaches to how we do it this way and this way and this way, but the big concept of deployment being important, like you can say, you're doing all these things but if you haven't communicated that or deployed it to all the people. It's kind of like you haven't done it because if they don't know about it they can't do it, and so we've really had to emphasize not just what approach we're taking, but how did we deploy it. And then what did we learn and how do we integrate it with other things going on in the company? So that was kind of an aha moment for me anyway.

Speaker 1: 33:22

Well, I have one last question for maybe this section of the podcast, and then we're going to move into section two. The one last question for each of you is thinking about all your leadership experiences that you've had and you've each had multiple leadership experiences in your career so far. What would you say if you could only give one piece of advice? Is a piece of advice you would give to leaders listening to this podcast?

Speaker 4: 33:49

You have to look at three things, I think you have to. You have to execute the work that you have. You have to. You have to really drive out the reality of your situation so you can act on it right. So execution is kind of underpins everything else. And then you constantly need to be thinking about how you can evolve into, you know, the next, either your organization, your leadership team, yourself, into the future. And then you know the last piece is really, you know you got to grow. You got to grow. If you're not growing you're dying. You know you're probably not just staying status quo. So you got to get yourself up and out and you know pushing towards growth every day and try to try to expand your opportunities.

Speaker 1: 34:39

I love compound answers. That's awesome.

Speaker 3: 34:42

And that's great, because I say, yes, you have to do all those things, and the final closing line would be reach for the stars, because when you do all that, you have to. Where are you going? And I feel like people sometimes sell themselves short of what they personally can do or what their organization and team can do, and so just think about that you reach for the stars as you do all those things and really make a difference, and it doesn't get better than that in the leadership world and the world of that we all live in every day.

Speaker 1: 35:18

Thank you both for being here and having this conversation with us today. We'll take a short pause and we'll be back next time with a conversation with Celeste and Janet about leadership Continued. Thank you, listeners, for joining us today. We hope that you were inspired by this conversation.

Speaker 2: 35:36

And we invite you to join our community on Patreon See the link below. There you will find more resources to help you on your leadership journey.

Speaker 1: 35:44

Make sure to join us next time for more conversation about leadership excellence.