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Sharon Sloane · Calm Under Fire

• Col. John Boggs: Welcome back to Calm Under Fire. I'm John Boggs and I am the president of Fortitude Consulting. And we are a executive leadership development and coaching firm. And today I'm joined by Sharon Sloan, CEO of Will Interactive, a company she has led for more than three decades, helping organizations transform human behavior when it matters most. Her work spans the military, healthcare systems, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies focusing on culture, leadership, and proactive risk and insights. Sharon, it is great to have you here. Sharon Sloane: My pleasure, John. Delightful Col. John Boggs: Well Sharon, do you mind if we jump right into it? Okay. Sharon, many organizations say ⁓ want culture change, but their behavior rarely changes. What's going on with that? Why is that? Sharon Sloane: Let's do it, John. Yeah, that's a great question because you know, John, culture is really what people do when no one is watching. It's kind of the unspoken rule of the way we do things around here. And it has very little to do with annual compliance training, which is what many leaders are surprised about when there's an incident, a sexual harassment situation, a cybersecurity breach. Col. John Boggs: Mmm. Sharon Sloane: workplace violence, any of these things, we often hear from senior leaders, well, wait a minute, we did compliance training on that topic and everyone completed it. What happened? Well, what happened is that that has very little impact on what people do in the throes of their daily workplace life. And so much of what's passing as training is just poor quality. ⁓ And when it isn't resonating with the team, the employees, what happens is that it actually has a negative effect. It's almost worse than doing nothing. And the reason that happens is, and we've all seen this check the box training, we've probably all taken it, people kind of tune out, they just go through, Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: click through the screens, get their completion certificate. Well, the message that leadership is sending to the staff when they do that is twofold. One, I don't really respect you enough to give you something really worthwhile. I don't value you. So just do it. It's part of your job. And secondly, I probably don't care very much about the topic either. Col. John Boggs: Mm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: or I would be giving you something that was meaningful and relevant. And so the reason the culture doesn't change is because many leaders are going about this with good intentions, but absolutely wrong. there's a completely different approach that's needed. If you want to influence what people do in the moments that matter, you have to first diagnose and understand the environment and the people. And that behavioral intelligence is foundational. If you don't have it and you put out generic training, assuming everyone's the same, and you do it like an annual vaccination, Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: you're not going to get anywhere because you're not tailoring the experiences to the individual where he or she really is. And so in order to mitigate risk and maximize the strengths of your workforce, you really have to start with that diagnosis and assessment. Col. John Boggs: Okay, so you focus on helping leaders see their risk early. You're helping them mitigate their risk. So what behaviors from the leaders create, well, actually create the risk? I think you were talking about that a little bit. I mean, long before anyone notices. It seems as though you can almost tell things are not right. So what behaviors are coming from the leaders that create the risk? Sharon Sloane: Well, I hate to put it this bluntly, but ignorance creates risk. And I say that from a standpoint of senior leadership needs to understand what's going on in the organization at the people level. ⁓ This has nothing to do with not caring or not being bright, but you have to invest in basically a periscope. Col. John Boggs: Mm hmm. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: So think of you're a captain of a ship. The periscope will alert you to an iceberg off in the distance. And then you need a navigation system that alters your course to avoid that iceberg. Let me give you a couple of concrete examples, make sense. So you've got this rock star employee, sales leader, sales manager is blowing the doors off the quota. The board's ecstatic about the revenue that's coming in. You're reducing the churn. And then you find out the guy's a complete jerk. It's so bad, and this is a real story, it's so bad that on a recent company golf outing, nobody wanted to play golf with him because they didn't want to be stuck in the golf cart with this guy for three or four hours. Okay. The next night, At a dinner reception at this offsite, he was totally inappropriate in his behavior, said all the wrong things, behaved badly with a female manager, and now she's filed a complaint with HR. So there you have a rock star and a big problem. Now the first thing a leader needs to do is ask themselves, ⁓ is this an outlier? Is this one guy or gal who just doesn't get it, doesn't live our values, or is this symptomatic of our culture? Do I not know? Or worse yet, do I know that I'm looking the other way? We also see this a lot. We do a lot of work with prestigious healthcare systems. So you've got the brilliant doctor. She's an amazing surgeon. She's saving lives every day, okay? But she's bullying her team. The nurses and the technicians that work with her dread every encounter. She's nasty to patients' families and sometimes even to the patients. but her articles are published in all the great medical journals. How do you reconcile these two things? So you need to understand what's going on first, the periscope, and then find out if these types of things are happening in your organization. they systemic? Are they an outlier? And then how to address them. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm sorry, I have to ask this. Do you find that in your work, the people that you just described as an example, do they realize how bad they're acting? Do they realize the situations they're creating or are they completely oblivious? Sharon Sloane: That's a great question, John, because you're talking about the actual, in this case, the surgeon or the sales manager. Oftentimes they're oblivious. ⁓ We have too few opportunities in this life, I believe, to see ourselves as others see us. And a lot of our work that we do with organizations is helping people see themselves Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Thank Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: as others see them, but not in a defensive way. By portraying it in our interactive movies, someone that looks like, sounds like them, but isn't them. The other problem are the people that don't care. They think they're above the law, so to speak. Look, I'm making you zillions of dollars. This is who I am. Take me for who I am. It's a package deal. So you end up with a different problem, one also that leadership has to address. So part of the value of your question is, which one are you dealing with? Col. John Boggs: Yes. ⁓ my goodness. in your experience, ⁓ most of the, are these major failures that I call that a major failure, are these major failures, are they, ⁓ is it a system problem? mean, ⁓ is it a leader, when does a leader roll in? When does the leader have to take this on? Or do they just slough it up? Well, this is just a system, she's okay, or he's okay. ⁓ When does it when does the leader have to step in? Sharon Sloane: Well, you know, there are certainly times when somebody just doesn't understand the policy or can't comprehend procedures. That happens. Those are the easy ones to kind of fix. Most of these problems are leadership problems. And a lot of it comes down to the fact that there's a lack of rehearsal in making difficult decisions under pressure. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mmm. Sharon Sloane: people don't have the opportunity to practice. And we're very emotional creatures, as we all know. So if you've never encountered this situation before, you're going to default to whatever your default is. Our job as leaders is to change the default, to build different muscle memory. So let's take, for example, another type of situation and all of these things basically actually happened. There's a huge industry virtual meeting conference. Anyone who's anybody needs to be there. The speakers are the gurus of your industry. Your CEO says, I really wanted to do this, but I have a conflict. can't move. So he or she says to the chief marketing officer, I really need you. to register and sign in and be our face of our company. Fine. Chief marketing officer registers, she makes sure she's dressed appropriately that day, has had a good lunch. Two minutes before the event, the virtual event is to begin, it says, install this to participate. Get two minutes. Now, what are you going to do? Something in the back of your head says, think the cybersecurity training warned us about installing stuff, but this is two minutes away. The CEO's counting on me. If I call IT, how's the IT guy gonna react or gal gonna react? Are they gonna hustle up to my office? Are they going to be very condescending? Like, don't you remember what we taught you in the training? Do I call the CEO? Well, chances are I can't even reach the CEO. They're probably in a meeting. Well, that chief marketing officer has had no practical training, no simulation, no virtual training to understand what to do under pressure. And that's what we here at Will Interactive are so convinced is required because what we want to do is put people in these situations through the simulations, through the interactive movies. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: that are real events and let you practice what to do and what are the near term and long term consequences. So that when you face something like that in real life, the bell goes off, okay. But when the bell goes off, the culture is such that IT hustles over to help you right away and is more than happy to help you because they're helping the company. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: It's their job, just like your job is the marketing, rather than, how could you even think of doing this? I'll check on it tomorrow. So leadership needs to go across the silos. And silos are a big issue in a lot of companies because IT may not talk to marketing that much. But when it comes to culture, to go back where we started, Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: the way we do things around here. is x and that starts at the top. Col. John Boggs: Wow. I've heard companies. I've heard companies and work with a couple who it was as though I mean the leadership would say, we have the culture here is awful. And I would smile. I said, really? The culture is awful. It's as though the culture starts at the bottom and goes and goes up. That's not my experience. Cultures. Can you talk about that? Which direction does culture flow up or down? Sharon Sloane: Right? Well, up, down and sideways, actually. But ⁓ you're absolutely right. ⁓ You know, lot of organizations have people in different physical locations. OK, it might be different states within the United States. It might be different countries. So you need to be aware of, you know, if you have an employee in Japan and someone else in California. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: There's some differences in their environment and what's going on there. ⁓ But the universal currency is not money. The universal currency is trust. It's trust. And trust goes every which way. And I'll explain what I'm talking about here. a great leader I know, a brilliant leader, a wonderful a gentleman and a fabulous mentor of mine had a saying, surprises are for birthdays. No leader wants to be flat-footed in a situation. So as a leader, here's the question, does your team feel safe coming to you and saying, Houston, we have a problem, or reporting to you about an inconvenient truth? I really wish it weren't this way. but we're gonna miss this deadline and here's why. Are you gonna shoot the messenger? Is somebody else on the team going to retaliate because it reflects negatively on them? So what is your culture in terms of trust? And it works the other way. How authentic are you as a senior leader with your team? So let's say we have a crisis. Something comes up. I don't have all the answers, John. I just don't know what to do here. I have some ideas. Can I get my team huddled and say, hey, listen, I just want to tell you guys, I don't have all the answers here. I need your brain trust. I need your input. We're in this together. And can we get the juices flowing? That provides trust. It has to go both ways. And there was nothing more detrimental to, in my opinion, in an organization than a lack of trust. Because if you lose trust, what have you got? And by the way, that's not limited internally. That's external too. We, unfortunately, and this is a personal story, a number of years ago, we were working with another company, a partner. ⁓ It happened to be a government contract, but Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: We were subcontractor to this prime contractor. And my team was building great products, meeting the deadline. I mean, it was chugging along beautifully, but we weren't getting paid. So we were paying our people. We kept reaching out to the partner. there was an accounting system failure. ⁓ the computers were down. A so-and-so was on leave. Well, to make a long story short, Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Oof. Sharon Sloane: Basically, they were taking the money that the government was giving them for us and keeping it. Now it became a legal issue and it was a big mess. We had no choice at that point to engage an attorney and all the things you don't want to do. But almost more painful than the financial loss was that betrayal. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: that lack of ethics, that lack of trust, and then telling our team, this is what happened. ⁓ So I don't care how volatile the world is, and Lord knows we have our challenges now. To me, the universal currency is trust. Col. John Boggs: Yeah. Wow. You know, Sharon, leaders are often rewarded for their performance. And oddly enough, it's not their awareness. And as you were just talking about, mean, trust and... How do you help a leader take responsibility for the outcomes? do you, I mean, that company should have had a leader in charge there that was aware and, hey, wait a minute, that's not us, that's not what we do, that's not who we are. So how do you help a leader take responsibility for things? Sharon Sloane: Well, you we all know the golden rule, right? Well, there's this sort of derivative of the golden rule that's not very pleasant, but it's he who has the gold makes the rules. ⁓ Now, here's a couple of examples from the real world on that one. So let's say you have a really valuable client. They're paying you the big bucks, okay? Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Ahem. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, they are. Sharon Sloane: valuable client, but they are mistreating your team terribly. They're harassing people, they're bullying people, they're threatening. Your folks hate to come to work when they have to deal with this client, but the client is generating revenue. The board's all excited because we blew the doors off the numbers this quarter. It can even be a vendor. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: Um, you know, sometimes you get into a situation, let's say with an advertising agency, the people are super creative. They're building the brand. They're eliminating churn. But again, they're just obnoxious, terrible people to work with. Their behavior is terrible. They're not terrible. And your team is saying, just read every meeting, every zoom call. So what we need to do. is we need to give ourselves as senior leaders and our people help and practice in addressing these situations. Because if it's the first time it's ever happened and you're asked to figure it out, that's difficult. But if you've had opportunities to play these situations out safely, Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: through learning experiences, through behavioral intelligence. If you understand that when you hit this, ⁓ wait a minute, this rings a bell. I have some ideas about what to do or who to go to. I'm not caught flat-footed. And those rehearsals cannot be in vanilla environments. We have to portray in a simulated environment the stress and the emotional fatigue that the individual, psychological state that he or she is going to be in when they face this problem, it can't be ho-hum, you know, all just hypothetical. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. And that sounds very military, because we rehearse, we rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, we train, train, train for the ugly things. You know, just in the event it happens, it's not the first time we've seen this. So we know what to do. So that's a wonderful way of approaching this. Wonderful. And I love universal currency is trust. I love that. Sharon Sloane: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Col. John Boggs: Now, what's the hardest thing? The hardest mind shift for a leader? I mean, what's the hardest thing for them to do? Or is there a hard thing? Sharon Sloane: Well, I think moving from reactive to proactive means that you have to invest in assessing what's going on before you start throwing solutions at it. ⁓ Generic training is usually put out there. We'll give leadership training. It doesn't matter what your position is. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: You're a new supervisor, you've been in the role for six months, or you've been with the company for 20 years and you're a senior manager. So to move from reactive to proactive, you have to change your mindset. And this has nothing to do with employee engagement surveys. I mean, those instruments have their place. That's fine. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about neuroscience-based diagnostic tools. that you as a leader are deploying across your organization so that you can get actual information on where there are pressure points and who's putting the company at risk. So maybe what's going on in the sales department is very different than in finance or engineering. Maybe it's people that are new in their role, new managers, people in their job less than two years. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: It's an age demographic thing. It could be gender. But you as a leader want to save time, save money and be effective. You want your company to grow and have a great reputation and your employees to thrive. So you can't just abdicate this and say, well, HR or learning development or whoever it is in your particular company. Well, they'll put training out. No, that's not how it works. ⁓ We need rehearsal. We need neuroscience based training. We need diagnosis. We need to understand power dynamics. And that's why our arsenal of tools, when we work with an organization and we talk to the senior leaders and we get a feel for what's going on, we can pick from the right arrows from the quiver. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: let's be proactive about this because it's so important. So there's a mind shift there. Col. John Boggs: There's a mind shift there. And that's wonderful. You use a lot of tools and it sounds like you guys are very up to speed on that. And talking about being up to speed on things, I believe you've also integrated AI into your behavioral insights. That's, I think that's, can you tell me about that? do leaders misunderstand the role ⁓ of technology? in shaping the culture. I mean, can you tell us about that? Sharon Sloane: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, everybody's talking about AI ⁓ and like everything else, it be put to good use and not to good use. But the power of artificial intelligence is how it supports human intelligence. We feel it works at the intersection, artificial intelligence at the intersection of human intelligence. And so what our AI powered platform does is it helps us better, more Col. John Boggs: Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: quickly and more accurately, collect information, analyze it, and deliver actionable insights to leadership so that they can understand and improve their organization. It saves them time and money because they're not doing things that don't matter. They're targeting the people with the right experiences. So it's not a one size fits all. It's, this is what's happening and it's happening over here. And it's happening in this kind of a situation. And we even embed an AI learning coach in our learning experiences. So let's say that you and I are both working through a sexual harassment learning experience training. And you have a question. You can ask that AI coach your question. I don't have that question. I know that, but I have a different question. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: You already know, I can ask the coach my question. It's almost like a facilitator, but it's your personal facilitator. Or it's in the old days when we would do a lot of these things live, it would be like going to the instructor at the break and saying, hey, John, I didn't quite get that. Maybe I didn't want to raise my hand in front of the other 40 people. And you say, oh, well, Sharon, listen, this is kind Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: the way it works. ⁓ And then when you do this, you have to monitor for impact. You can't make assumptions. So this is a continuous loop. You diagnose, you remediate, then you monitor for impact. What's going well, what changed, what didn't change, what new problem might have surfaced, and then you sustain that over time. So it's not Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: go for your annual inoculation, it's dynamic. It's dynamic. Leaders are dynamic. Circumstances change. Staff changes. The world changes. So what the AI allows us to do is change in real time. Things that used to take a long time. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: We got the reports and analyzed them. What took days is now happening in hours, sometimes minutes. And then instead of delivering this big stack of stuff that's not really useful, we put it into a format. Col. John Boggs: Excuse me. Sharon Sloane: problem that's easy to digest and actionable. then quarterly, we work with the senior leader to determine what else needs to be done and what else is going on and how effective this is and where else we might want to navigate. Col. John Boggs: Thank you for that. Now let me jump, I really wanna ask you about this because it's so close to home. You're using the AI tools and that's fabulous. Your work also includes prevention. Being a military guy, I'm very interested. Can you talk about that? Sharon Sloane: Yeah. So I'm going to get a little personal here for a moment. You can't see above my desk, but above my desk is one of my most prized possessions. It is a letter from former secretary of the army, Pete Guerin, ⁓ official letter and a coin. as a military officer, you're well aware of all of that. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: when we did our suicide prevention work. And I'll talk about that in a minute, but at the bottom of that letter in his own handwriting, he wrote, PS, I am confident your work has saved lives. Now that's what gets me up and excited every morning, but here's what happened. And this was a number of years ago. We were losing about 35 soldiers a month to suicide. And of course that was frightening, unacceptable, whatever adjective you want to use. And the army had tried a number of interventions and they weren't working. Because we had a long history of working with the military and healthcare organizations. They asked us if we could apply our methodology and our technology to the problem. And my co-founder is a retired Marine Corps Colonel, like yourself. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: I don't have any military background, but there I was with him sitting in the Pentagon with all this brass and all these flags. And they're saying, can you do something with your technology, with your methodology? This was before officially using AI. We were actually using it years ago, but we can talk about that. And we said, yes, but. Col. John Boggs: Ahem. Sharon Sloane: And here's the but. In order to do what we want to do, we're going to have to portray a soldier in this interactive movie with suicidal ideation. Col. John Boggs: Ahem. Oof. Sharon Sloane: John, you could have heard a pin drop. Okay. Fortunately, there were some brilliant, visionary, amazing military leaders in that room. And they said, okay, go on. And we explained. And they said, if that's what it's going to take, let's do it. And we had extensive research and a lot of support from the army. Col. John Boggs: I could imagine. Sharon Sloane: focus groups, interviews. We built this interactive movie and the vice chief at that time, P. Corelli, called a worldwide stand down. Every American soldier and army civilian around the world used this program for two hours in a 30 day period. And after that period and the nine months that followed, we reduced army suicide by over 60%. 60%, yeah. Col. John Boggs: Wow. Sharon Sloane: It completely changed the face of everything. It was unbelievable. I had calls from people, phone calls. You saved my husband's life. You saved my daughter's life. I mean, I've never had anything that emotional in my work life as that stretch of time. And then of course we went on to do a similar program for the Army Reserves and the National Guard because this one was for active duty. ⁓ But I say that because what really has to happen, whether it's the military, a corporate environment, a healthcare organization, is you have to get real and you have to do the research. You have to understand what's really going on and then fictionalize. for the purpose of the learning experiences, obviously not using people's names or locations, actual events, which is what we do. And over the years on a number of different topics, where let's say it's a bystander intervention or maybe you see someone struggling with mental health in your corporation in a commercial environment. People are, they wanna help, they don't wanna say the wrong thing and heaven forbid make it worse for the individual that's already suffering. ⁓ There's a lot of misinformation about their, out there about suicide by asking people questions that doesn't put people into suicide, but what I've heard over, and we have tens of millions of users now over the years, I've heard, can you give me the words? Can you give me the words? I understand the concept. And so we go beyond giving the words to actually immersing people in the situation that resembles what they might encounter. Col. John Boggs: Thank Sharon Sloane: So now your boss is acting strangely in meeting after meeting. Maybe it's on Zoom, maybe it's in person, whatever it might be. You know something's wrong, but he's your boss. Like how do you reach out? Because this is upwards, downwards and sideways. And what we do is we give people the experience of interacting with this case, the boss, but it could be a colleague or a subordinate. ⁓ they've practiced this. Now I know generally how to do it. Of course, I'm going to tailor this and you hope you never have that situation, but if you do, I'm going to tailor it to my relationship with him or her and how we speak. But most people really want to help other people. They want to do the right thing, but we're afraid to do the wrong thing. And without practice, people sometimes just don't do anything. And I even had a conversation with an executive about our sexual harassment training not too long ago. And he said, people hate sexual harassment training. We have to do it. It's legally required. I've been at this for years. They always hate it. But you know, we used yours last year. People really liked it. I said, well, why did they like it? said, because it added value. It was relevant. It made sense. It was, they were emotionally engaged. They could see these kinds of things happening and it had something to do with their real life. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Wow. Wow. So that's how you get it to stick. You get it onto real life. Because what makes this stick for them? What makes the training stick? What is that? It makes the training last. Sharon Sloane: Yeah. We have, we human beings are rather complex creatures. I'm going to over our brains, but in our brain, we have multiple, what they call domains. One of them has to do with physical strength and flexibility. That's not really relevant here, but the two domains that are relevant are the cognitive and the affective. The cognitive part of the brain has to do with knowledge, information, skills. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: that sort of logical part. The affective side of the brain is where our emotions, our feelings, our beliefs live. Well, all of us are walking around with an invisible pair of glasses. These glasses are perceptual filters. So anything we see or hear is going through these perceptual filters, mine are different than yours. But all of them come down to this sweet spot in the brain where the affective or the emotional meets the logical or the cognitive. And in that sweet spot is where we make decisions. That's where critical thinking lives. That's where decision making changes. That's where we have the power to influence. And we direct everything. And this is, you know, 30 plus years of learning. and experimenting and lessons learned and best practices hit that sweet spot and you can really make an impact. But you have to know what you're doing. And to go back like to the suicide example, and I need to even mention this because it was catastrophic. You can't get it wrong. Like if you don't know what you're doing, don't do anything. Because there actually was a Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: some suicide prevention training years ago was not the army, but was another part of the military that was exacerbating the problem because the people that were doing it didn't know how to do it properly. And they, of course, pulled the plug on the whole program. so there's an art and a science to this. have to get it both right. Col. John Boggs: If a CEO wants to shape their culture, intentionally do it, starting tomorrow, what would be their first step? What's the first thing they would do? Sharon Sloane: I would say that the first thing to do is say, and I believe this, culture is my business. And I mean that for the double meaning. Our culture is my business and it's my business to understand our culture. Because oftentimes what happens is senior leaders think, well, that's HR or that's learning and development. Now, don't get me wrong. There's some amazing people and we've worked with some of them in HR learning and development. They have a great deal to contribute. But for leaders, you can't delegate this. You can delegate the execution, the implementation, but it has to come from you placing the fundamental priority. know, there's a kind of a cliche, people are our greatest asset. A lot of folks would say, not my company, it's just a platitude, right? Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Oof. Yeah. Sharon Sloane: That's a saying on the wall in the conference room. You have to walk the talk. You have to live it. And the way you live it is to invest in it. And actually it ends up saving you money. But if you invest in this, if you understand human decision-making, you don't have to become an expert or psychologist or anything like that. But if you understand that how you really move the needle, Col. John Boggs: Mmm. Sharon Sloane: impact in people. People sense that all around you. It changes the dynamic. It changes how people perceive operations. The tasks become part of something bigger, part of something greater, part of something who we are here, part of something about what makes us special. People want to work in good places. They want to thrive. They want to excel. ⁓ And they want leadership that understands that this is not off to the side. And I think that's where a lot of leaders go wrong because they're focused on KPIs metrics around revenue growth. And those are extremely important, extremely important. But what enables that are the people. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Sharon Sloane: mean, of course there's equipment and machinery and things like that. You can't delegate that. It has to come from the top. And like some of the situations we talked about earlier, when catastrophic events occur, when there's a multimillion dollar lawsuit or cybersecurity breach or your IP is suddenly all over the internet, where does the buck stop? Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mmm. Sharon Sloane: It's not the IT director. It's the CEO. The general counsel may be the COO. So you can't as a senior leader afford to delegate this. Implementation, execution, ideas, yes. But it has to be your mindset, your priority. Col. John Boggs: Sharan, for leaders who are listening who want to learn more about will, interactive, or to connect with you directly, what's the best way for them to do that? And they would be foolish not to connect with you directly. So how would they connect? Sharon Sloane: Well, I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's great. Or just email me, Sharon, S-H-A-R-O-N, at willinteractive.com. Sharon at willinteractive.com. I will respond to you. I love to interact with people. And if you're interested, we have a number of free assessment tools and reports, kind of from the trenches. I'll be happy to share them with you. There's no cost, there's no obligation. you know, just reach out. So I have your email and your name and what you might be interested in. We have a lot of resources that I'm happy to share, as I say, at no cost, but just to give you some tools and give you some insights, ⁓ either LinkedIn or my email, Sharon at wellinteractive.com would be the best places. Col. John Boggs: Mm-hmm. Well, to everyone that's listening, please, here's a big takeaway here. Universal currency is trust. You need to be aware of that. Universal currency is trust. If you're lost with how to go about changing our culture and doing things with our culture, you might want to get in with Sharon and get some help. I'm pretty sure she will help you out. Sharon, this was powerful and thoughtful. Thank you so much. Your work is amazing. I love what you're doing with suicide. Needless to say, that touches my heart very, very directly. ⁓ And how you're helping senior leaders in organizations, I think that's absolutely fabulous. Thank you very much. Sharon Sloane: Thank you, it was a pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. Col. John Boggs: Thank you, thank you Sharon. And to everyone else, that's it. We'll see you later, out here.