Summary

Dr. James Chitwood, an accomplished author and expert in performance culture, explores the crucial role of culture and targeted sales training in building high-performing teams. With a background steeped in sales, Dr. Chitwood’s approach is deeply rooted in ethical, consultative practices that prioritize a value-driven mindset. He underscores how a positive culture within sales teams not only boosts individual morale but elevates overall performance. In his book, Leadership is Not Enough, he dives into the strategies for fostering a constructive work environment, focusing on training, recognition, accountability, and communication

Chapters

0:00 – Introduction to Dr. James Chitwood
0:36 – Dr. Chitwood’s Journey into Sales Training
3:09 – Key Insights from “Leadership is Not Enough”
5:37 – The Flower of Life in Business
9:53 – Formal vs. Social Systems in Business
13:00 – Peer Training and Recognition
15:15 – Importance of Effective Communication
19:25 – The Power of Teams over Leadership
27:17 – Essential Leadership Qualities Today
31:54 – Everyone is in Sales
34:16 – Aligning Personal Growth with Company Goals
37:05 – Spirituality in the Workplace
42:37 – Leading with Authenticity and Inclusivity
44:35 – Final Thoughts and Takeaways
45:29 – Closing Remarks

Transcript

Melissa Aarskaug (00:01.822)
Welcome to another episode of the Executive Connect podcast, where we explore the intersection of leadership, innovation, and personal development. Today, we have a truly fascinated guest with us, Dr. James Chitwood. Dr. Chitwood is an accomplished author, performance culture expert, and certified sales trainer with a deep understanding of what it takes to create high performing teams.

Welcome Dr. James.

Dr. James Chitwood (00:33.511)
Thank you, Melissa. I appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Melissa Aarskaug (00:36.268)
I’m so excited to talk to you about culture and sales training. So share with the listeners a little bit about how you got in to become a certified sales trainer that works with high performing teams.

Dr. James Chitwood (00:51.603)
Yeah, absolutely, Melissa. sales has been part of my life, basically my entire life. My father was a salesperson. My uncle invented a sales training process, a sales process called track selling. He invented that. mean, as long as I can be, I’ve been alive. It’s, I think it was 67 when he started it. So quite a long time ago. So I first went through the training when I was 13 and it’s just always been part of my life. And

His approach to selling is a very ethical consultative approach and it’s very systematic and operational. so those two things work really well with my mind, which is one, always being a value, right? It’s our mantra. Never make a sales call unless you’re providing value. Never just touch base. If you’re not giving value, don’t reach out, right? But then it’s taken all the ambiguity out of the sales and building a process.

That whole dichotomy of value and processes in sales really, really resonated for me and just became part of what I did. I was really successful in my career. so next thing I know, I was no longer the sales leader. I was then, you know, that general manager, the leader of the overall org. And yet I still kept that same philosophy going. And I just ran my career for a long, long time that way.

building successful operations, but looking at them through that sales operation value driven mindset. And you know, when people think of sales, they don’t often think of positive cultures, right? They think of boiler rooms, they think of driving the numbers home. And it’s not the way I look at it. It’s not the way truck selling works, right? It’s all about everybody’s invested or we don’t make the sale, right? It’s good or it’s not. And so it’s this whole

cultural positive performance mindset that can permeate every division in an operation. And so, you know, I just continue to do this for the very longest time and the universe does what the universe does. And it kept smacking me on the back of the head until I finally just said, all right, God, universe, I give up. I’ll go consult. I’ll write a book. I’ll bring it out to the world and I’ll see what kind of value I can give at the greater scale than just my one operation.

Melissa Aarskaug (03:09.634)
Talk to us a little bit about your book. What can the listeners find inside your book? Some of the key nuggets.

Dr. James Chitwood (03:16.849)
Yeah, so my book, it’s funny, my sister was reading my book and she goes, Jim, what are you leading out for your consulting business? Because as I’m reading this, I’m thinking I could just literally take this and do everything. I said, absolutely. That’s my purpose. It’s called leadership is not enough, which is ironic from somebody who has a doctorate in organizational leadership. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the value of leadership. just think we

we falsely place too much emphasis on the leader and not enough on the environment that the people work within. And that’s really the key to my book is let’s look at that operating environment, because I’m an ops mind, right? And so it’s how do we make that work? So I’ve covered, I believe that the four elements to a positive environment involve training. How are you training your people? It involves recognition. How are you recognizing not only the individual, but the team as a whole? Accountability, it’s important.

How are you holding your people accountable in a positive way? How are you doing it though? It’s very important. And then communication, which is the one thing that runs through everything that most organizations don’t spend enough time thinking about is their internal communication strategy. So what will they get out of my book? Very, very practical advice on how to handle those four elements in an organization. To the point where in the back I got how to do’s and don’ts. It’s called leadership is not enough.

an operator’s guide to a performance culture, because that’s really what it is. It’s an operator’s manual on how to create the right cultural environment for people to thrive.

Melissa Aarskaug (04:52.086)
I love something you just said. You mentioned that you could be the best leader and you could be in a bad culture. Therefore, are you really the best you can be? So culture is a really absolutely important piece of leadership. So if it’s not, like you said, supportive, it doesn’t have the…

the nuggets of holding people accountable, good and bad. It’s all encompassing. So I love, I wanna dive a little bit deeper into some of the topics in your book and what you do. So let’s talk a little bit about the flower of life in business. Can you tell us what the flower of life is and what is really the significance of it?

Dr. James Chitwood (05:37.181)
Yeah, sure, absolutely. So I’m going to geek out on you right now. At the quantum level, scientifically, we know that all energy is connected. We know this as a fact. All energy on our planet is connected. So the spirit of life is an ancient symbol found in temples across the world where people, they weren’t talking to each other at the time that they were building these temples. Okay. The flower of life is as simple as existed that long.

And what it means is it is the symbol to visualize the interconnectivity of all life, all energy on our planet. To me, that is a great example of what culture is. Because you can’t treat one employee one way without recognizing the effect it has on everybody else. It’s so interesting companies that will think of culture and they’ll give it this grand

verbose language around it, and yet they’ll fire a division without thinking twice about the effect on everybody else, right? And so I, know, Nike, the,

goodness, who is a game developer? Mario Brothers. Nintendo, the CEO of Nintendo, they had developed a couple terrible games in a row and their market position, their financials were struggling. instead of cutting salary or instead of cutting divisions and people, which most at the grandest scale CEOs would do like that, he instead took a 50 % pay cut.

And his C team all took pay cuts as well, not as high as his, but they all took pay cuts and that allowed the company to keep going. And people asked him, why did you do that? He said, well, yeah, I could have cut salaries. mean, I mean, I could have cut people and I could have looked great for the quarter. Our stock price would have rebounded. It would have been great. And five years later, we would have been a worse company. And here’s the key. He said, cause how can anybody do their best work if they’re worried about keeping their job? Right.

Dr. James Chitwood (07:40.615)
And that’s really the point, right? Is that we have to recognize that anything we do in an organization permeates with everybody else. And we can’t look at it from an isolated perspective. It is all one energy that drives that organization. So that’s how the flower of life ties into an organizational.

Melissa Aarskaug (08:03.222)
I’m curious, how did you come across the flower of life and really what inspired you to bring that part of your work and personal philosophy?

Dr. James Chitwood (08:14.171)
Yeah, so I’m a total geek and I was doing some research on, you know, the energies of our planet and people really are things that fascinate me. And so literally I was doing some study on a hermitage. The Templar Knights had a hermitage in France right along what is considered a couple major ley lines, which are energy pathways on our planet, if you believe in that. So

Anyways, I was fascinating why Christian monks would build a basically, I mean, it’s a stronghold, you’re not getting into this thing if you don’t want to, right? Type of church on Layla. Why would Christian monks who are known to be battling monks build a monastery on top of Layla? Right? That was just, to me, those were two totally different perspectives. And so as I dug deeper into it,

I had no idea what the flower of life was at the time. And so I was just looking into it and an east facing window on the winter solstice, a light shines through this one particular window and illuminates on the ground the flower of life symbol, which sits directly below the Virgin Mary statue. So that to me was a real just disconnect. Like, why would Christian monks beneath

the most Catholic symbol of the Virgin Mary have the flower of life. And so I started digging in the flower of life. That’s when I found out it existed in so many other places. And that just really got me looking more and more into it.

Melissa Aarskaug (09:53.026)
Let’s talk a little bit about the principle of life, how it really creates harmony and balance in company culture and businesses and in people.

Dr. James Chitwood (10:22.675)
Yeah, you know what’s fascinating is, I there’s a $74 billion global industry on leadership development in organizations. Most of that work is on cultural development and tea building and so what are called the social systems, right? The people. And my issue with that $74 billion, it is it has a five year life cycle in an organization. Right? So it’s a lot of money paid.

for something that isn’t going to last. And why is that? Because your average CEO has a five -year life cycle or less. And then it goes down from there, right? If you look at any given organization, at least 20 % of that workforce will not be there in a year. So they spend all this money and time focusing on the social systems, the people, which is cool until those people leave. So now a year later, you’ve got 20 % of your team

who are brand new, who didn’t go through all that neat training, who aren’t part of it, who are now disconnected, right? Because they’re focused on people development. And again, I believe in people, I love them. That money would be better spent if they focused on the formal systems. Why? Because formal systems are what last. And truth be told, most of us are doing most of our work when there’s no leader around, right? That all of this…

All of this credence we give to a leader doesn’t really matter because most of us are doing our work when there’s no leader around us and that’s what matters, right? Are we doing our best work then? Or are we doing the bare minimum, quiet quitting to just get by because this organizational environment doesn’t help me thrive.

Melissa Aarskaug (12:07.008)
Yeah, that’s I absolutely agree because you’re in this vicious vicious cycle of, know, hiring, retraining, rehiring, retraining, and everybody is constantly needing education and more training and more training as technology is changing, process is changing, business practice is changing. So it’s just I agree. I think it’s this vicious cycle of I need more training, I need more training when you’re not actually doing as much as you could be doing, right? Because there is a

opportunity cost to all this is right. It’s expensive, like you mentioned, to continuously train and teach employees without getting those employees productive and doing their jobs. So I absolutely agree. I want to talk a little bit about maybe some examples that you have with clients you’ve worked with, where this strategy has positively impacted their business or even their company culture.

Dr. James Chitwood (13:00.775)
Yeah, absolutely. So when I one of the things that I believe is a big mistake is

I believe in training departments. What I don’t believe is that the training department should be the one doing the training. And there’s a dichotomy in there or a disconnect. And the reason why is because, so the four elements, training and recognition in my model, I don’t call them separate. I don’t call them pillars of my model. I call them elements of my model because elements are designed to come together to build something stronger. And so I believe it’s a great form of recognition.

when you can find a coworker to train another coworker, right? When it becomes, you are saying, hey, you are great at this, let me recognize that and have you train somebody else. So we are currently implementing this with a client of mine and it is going extremely well. The people enjoy knowing that their skills are recognized beyond just doing the job.

but training someone else to do the job. Now it’s saying, look, because when we give to others, we intrinsically feel good, right? Like we just do. When we give to someone else, we intrinsically feel good about it. And so this company is seeing this, where these employees who are training other employees, yeah, they’re giving that person, we’re making them better. We’re also saving on resources, right? Because it’s not a training person, it’s a current employee doing it. But what the core piece here,

is that person feels good about doing it. And this employee is better connected to that employee creating stronger social bonds. And social bonds are incredible in culture. So in this organization that I’m working with, they are really seeing this stronger connection between their employees, which is critical to a strong culture. You there’s this old saying, people quit bosses and stay for teams. Right? In the world of leadership, it’s a very old saying that we can all appreciate.

Dr. James Chitwood (15:06.541)
And so this concept of having one employee training another helps build social bonds. And that’s what this company is saying.

Melissa Aarskaug (15:15.17)
That’s great. I love that. You mentioned something that I love at the beginning. want to talk a little bit more about is, know, really, sales 101. Don’t just call clients to call clients. How’s life? What’s going on? What are you up to? Calling clients for a purpose and a reason, providing value to them because all of us are busy. We’re all doing what’s most important to us in our life personally and professionally. I think a lot of times

Dr. James Chitwood (15:39.933)
is missing.

Melissa Aarskaug (15:44.534)
communication is not as effective as most people think. Most people think they’re communicating clearly and they’re training people clearly. So I want to talk a little bit kind of what you mentioned at the beginning about effective communication and why it’s really important in building and maintaining, you know, sales and successful businesses and training people and just why and how people can communicate more effectively.

Dr. James Chitwood (16:14.577)
Yeah, it’s fascinating. The two quickest ways to motivate or demotivate an employee, one is pay. Increase or decrease their pay and you’re going to motivate or demotivate them pretty darn quickly. And that’s just because it’s base level survival. It’s not that we are motivated by money. I don’t believe that. But we all have a roof we need to pay for and we all have food we need to pay for. Right. And so we all have bills. So that’s why you want to upset your employees, cut their pay. You want to motivate them, like just give them a little ha, give them money. Right. But it’s not.

a long -term solution. So pay and communication. The funny thing about communication is organizations spend a lot of money thinking about their external communication, right? Building branding strategies, right? Their external strategies for communication. They’ll spend any time or money on their internal communication. So what happens is they take what I call brand speak and they bring it all the way down the chain of command and it doesn’t help anybody.

It doesn’t help them understand how to do their job better. So a good internal communication strategy needs to be one where there’s a couple elements. Number one, all internal communication is changed by department to say, how does this information help them do their job? Not just company as a whole, but hey, programmer, hey, accountant, hey, salesperson. This is how this information

helps you do your job or how it relates to you specifically in your job. Why? Because then it’s personal and then it resonates with them. Right? So that’s number one is all internal communication needs to be broken apart that way. Number two, there needs to be a direct line of communication, both anonymous and attributable communication flows from the frontline employees all the way up to the boss, CEO, right? To the C -suite, not

filtered through managers, but direct. And then that information needs to be captured, recorded, and brought back to the team to let them know I’m listening. And these are the things we can act upon, and these are the things we cannot, and why not. Listen, employees will bring up ideas that you can’t do anything about, but you need to tell them you’re listening. You need to say, I hear you, and we can’t do that because. Or we can’t do that this year.

Dr. James Chitwood (18:38.365)
but we’re going to look at putting it in the budget for next year. When employees know that the C -suite is actually listening, then all of sudden they become what every organization should want, which, I forget his name, but he coined the phrase intrapreneurs, which I just love that saying, intrapreneurs, which is your internal employees thinking of ways to improve your operation. And if there’s anybody who knows best how to improve your operation,

It’s your frontline internal employees, right? That whole debacle at Southwest would have never happened if the C -suite was really listening to all the frontline employees who told them, listen, we’re going to have a problem and it’s coming fast. And then, and then they did.

Melissa Aarskaug (19:25.184)
Yeah, that’s fantastic point because what a business decision from a CEO is going to affect the engineering team much different than it’s going to affect the sales team because the sales team has to sell the new strategy and the engineering team has to deliver the strategy very separate things. If the sales team doesn’t understand what they’re selling and how they’re selling it, they can’t communicate it effectively to the clients to even get the clients to buy

whatever it is you’re selling and the engineering teams can’t deliver it correctly. They might understand an old process, an old way of doing something. And so I absolutely agree with you. It needs to be clear and how the directives going to affect sales and marketing and accounting and really everybody inside of an organization. So I think you’re spot on with communicating it from the top. And because a lot of times changes really, you know, are fearful for

for people too much change in an organization also makes people want to look for another job. It makes them, you know, not sure of their job, not sure how they should show up to work. And so, which ultimately affects their pay, right? If this strategy, you know, you’re going to use AI now and you have actual people doing jobs that they’re going to now shift to an AI tool. People can, you know, silently quit, find another job because out of fear.

when really if they would have been communicated and said, hey, your job’s not going anywhere. We’re just using this job for productivity. We’re using this new AI tool to help us with hiring. We still need you to interview the people in real time, but it’s the stories I think we tell ourselves, right, Dr. James? I think it’s the stories. People make meaning out of things that may not even be there, right?

Dr. James Chitwood (21:13.213)
Yeah.

Melissa Aarskaug (21:21.696)
maybe this HR AI tool that the HR department is going to start using, know, people make the decision in their mind that their job’s going to go away. And they just start kind of silently quitting, exiting when if in fact, a senior leader or a CEO would have explained why that decision was made, it would have made people

Dr. James Chitwood (21:33.618)
Yeah.

Melissa Aarskaug (21:46.166)
you know, be more all in, not look for another job, not silently quit. So I love what you’re saying and I absolutely agree. think, you know, communication really can create productivity and environment and having people that are all in with that kind of attitude. So I wanna talk a little bit about some of that and the importance of creating a team that’s pulling.

at the same end of the rope versus against each other and how using these tools that you mentioned can really create a more productive all in employees.

Dr. James Chitwood (22:26.22)
Yeah, absolutely. I want to touch base on something you said, because it was so spot on. While interviewing people for my book, I interviewed a principal and she said just the most poignant, salient thing on this topic. She says, and I quote, in the absence of information, fear takes hold. Right? And you said it yourself, we tell ourselves these stories. And it’s this fascinating thing that if we don’t explain it to people,

then they’re going to come up with their own explanation. It’s probably not going to be what you want. Right? So you know,

Melissa Aarskaug (23:02.122)
Right, yes. Our brain is trained to think negatively. Like we’re not, this is gonna be so positive. We’re gonna get all these new tools. Like this is great. I think we’re trained as humans to automatically react and be more fearful and make decisions based on stories, like you said, right?

Dr. James Chitwood (23:21.755)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And, and, you know, when talking about teams, you know, my research showed me that the leader is not statistically relevant to the performance of the team or of the individual, right? Let that sink in. The leader is not statistically relevant to the performance of the team. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. What I’m just saying

to drive the entire, or to the performance of the individual. The team was more important to the performance of the individual. The team statistically, mathematically, statistically, hard science had a greater impact on the performance of the individual than the leader did, right? And so it’s fascinating how we spend all this focus on leadership.

and not enough on the team environment, getting all the team members working together, as you said, pulling the rope from the same side, right? And equally pulling. And so, you know, if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’ve got your baseline, which is your safety and security, right? I describe it as a roof over your head and food upon your table. Then you’ve got social bonding, and then you’ve got all these other areas, you know, where esteem,

and, and, you know, true, true creativity at the top. We always want our employees to operate up there, but we don’t spend enough time understanding that a pyramid has to be strong in every structure, right? Every element, every layer has to be strong in the social bonding aspect. That second to bottom level of the social bond, that’s your team environment. And if organizations spend as much time on that as they do trying to get people to the top, well, the people will naturally go there because they’ll lift each other.

up. Right? The thing about a team is nobody wants underperformers on their team. Right? Unless you have an entire team of underperformers, then you got an entirely different problem. But for the most part, I find most people want to work hard and they want to do the best job they possibly can. Most people I know put into the right environment want to quote unquote perform. So when you create the right environment, they’re going to lift other people up because they don’t want to laggard on their team.

Dr. James Chitwood (25:41.243)
Right? And so that’s kind of the understanding that organizations need to get is they should spend more time and money developing the social bonds of their teams than they should on the annual bonus for their CEO.

Melissa Aarskaug (25:56.298)
Yeah, I love when you were saying that a quote came to mind. You’re the average of the five people you spend your time with, right? If everybody on the, if you have one person on the team that’s whining, moaning, complaining, we’re gonna all lose our jobs, we’re gonna, the company’s gonna go under, whatever the story is, it can really affect the emotion of the team and really bring down productivity and.

and efficiency. And so I absolutely agree. I think it is a team thing and one bad egg or one person’s, you know, comments or decisiveness to tear apart a team can really affect the outcome, not only of just that team, but of everybody in that organization. And I think, you know, it goes back to the leadership as well. think that leaders today have to develop

different skill sets than they did 10 years ago. It’s a very different, there’s lot of intricacies now dealing with employees in different countries or remote workers or different age groups. So there’s a lot of really essential qualities that leaders need to have these days. And I’m curious from your perspective, what are some of the top leadership qualities leaders need to have today?

Dr. James Chitwood (27:17.47)
Well, empathy, right? A high level of emotional intelligence, I just think is key. You know, we have, you know, when I started working a couple years ago, right, employees didn’t complain, right? You went to work, you did your job. That’s what it was. Now employees will complain in a moment’s notice, right? And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. If we’re giving, if we’ve got a positive

communication strategy in our organization, right? And we’re dealing with it. So one, they have to have emotional intelligence. They have to have empathy. They have to have a lack of ego. I always say leadership is lonely. That’s one of the first lessons I give to any newly promoted manager is super great. Unfortunately for you now you’re in management and you can be, you know, tight with those people.

But you can’t be friends with somebody you can fire at a moment. You you have the power to fire, right? So you have to understand that that exists. And so you got to check your ego at the door because your job is to develop those employees, right? They’re the ones doing the job, not you. So I think leaders today have to have that developmental focus that my job is to develop these people.

You know, once upon a time, employees used to come into the workforce and the workforce taught them how to do the job. Nowadays, we want everybody to hit the ground running. Well, that’s not always possible. And so the leader has to have the mindset that my job is to sit kneecap to kneecap with this employee to help them do their job better. And then once they’re doing their job better, then awesome, they can help other employees do their job better. Right. And so it’s understanding that your job

is to develop your people. I’m not a huge fan of the phrase servant leadership because in the end, you’re not serving someone if you have to terminate them. But I can also contradict that in my own head and say, you’re actually not doing them any good if they deserve to be terminated and you’re not, right? So you kind of have to understand that and have that balance in there. So those are some attributes that I think are critical in today’s world.

Melissa Aarskaug (29:34.582)
what you said too. Yes.

Dr. James Chitwood (29:34.891)
and listening. think listening is just, if there’s one thing, it’s the ability to listen with intent, right? Not just speak and not just pretend you’re listening, but really listen to intent for two things. One, did they really understand? Right? And one of my favorite questions to ask somebody is, all right, super cool. Now tell me what you just heard so that I know we’re on the same page. Right? So listening with intent, one, to make sure they really understood.

But two, to make sure there’s no emotional disconnection in there, right? Between what they say and what they’re doing and how they’re feeling, right? So I think that last piece, being a great listener is critical to being a good leader. It’s also critical to being a good salesperson.

Melissa Aarskaug (30:21.804)
Yeah, absolutely. think that’s a spot on point is as a salesperson, if you show up to a client and you say, hey, we offer this service and this service and this service and this product and this product. We’ve not heard what our customers said, right? We’ve not heard what their needs are if they need any of our services. And you first have to listen and understand where they are clearly. And then as a salesperson, we’re kind of like doctors, right? We got to listen to their symptoms and really what’s

their pain points, what’s keeping them up at night to really give them a solution that fits what they need. And so I love that as being a salesperson. I think, you know, I would say Dr. James, we’re all in sales, right? I think a lot of times people would say, I’m not a salesperson. I’m an introverted engineer. And I would respond to them and say, well, are you married? You have friends.

Dr. James Chitwood (31:06.225)
Absolutely.

Melissa Aarskaug (31:17.452)
job hobbies, all the people that are in your life. Yeah, you’ve sold at some point or another, right? Like you’ve had, you know, they’re buying, you know, you and what your values are and what you believe in. So I think, you know, I would say to all people, whether you’re in sales or not, we’re all in sales, it’s just how you want to attack it. And to have any meaningful relationships in your life, you’re gonna have to listen.

Dr. James Chitwood (31:20.029)
Children.

Melissa Aarskaug (31:44.522)
Sometimes instead of talking all the time. Otherwise people are not going to want to be around you

Dr. James Chitwood (31:49.991)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Nobody likes somebody who just sits there and talks the whole time.

Melissa Aarskaug (31:54.604)
Yeah, I agree. And I want to go back to something

Dr. James Chitwood (31:56.352)
Everybody likes a person who listens all the time. You want people to like you? Just ask them a question and just shut up and listen.

Melissa Aarskaug (32:05.674)
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to something you said about leadership. And I think a lot of times I hear people say, my boss is so tough on me, or they’re not hearing me, or they’re bullying me, or they’re not a great boss. I find sometimes some of the toughest managers have helped employees become better than they found them.

So I challenge everybody, and I’m not saying there’s not difficult managers or bad managers or bad situations. I’m saying, in my experience managing people for over 20 years now, I’ve heard sometimes that, that leader was too tough on me, but then I see people are in VP roles and they weren’t in any leadership roles or.

You know, they’re making double the salary they were or they’ve pivoted to a new field. And so, you know, I think sometimes some of those tough managers or the managers that push you to be better than they found you are actually helping you become better than you were. And they see something special in you. And so I would, I would challenge the listeners to also think about who’s leading you. You know, do they give you insights about yourself that you didn’t know?

Maybe yes, maybe no. And then really take some of those to heart and think about them. And I’m not saying all managers and leaders do the best at leading, but I think, think about them, right? And, you know, I want to talk a little bit about self -development. I hear a lot from my clients and groups I lead that we’re afraid to train our employees too much because if we train them too much, they’re going to be more valuable and take another job or

leave our company. So I want to talk a little bit about self -development for leaders and employees and how can businesses really make sure that that employees personal growth really aligns with the company’s goals and visions. So if you could share a little bit about that from your perspective.

Dr. James Chitwood (34:16.517)
Absolutely. A couple things. One, I believe that every single one -on -one meeting with an employee needs to be both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative, what are the numbers? How are we going towards them? Because it matters. And then qualitative, how does this job help you fit into your long -term life goals? Intrinsically, what are you trying to achieve? How do we align that achievement with the organization’s goals so that when we’re striving towards our organization’s goals, we’re actually helping you achieve your personal goals?

Right? Number two, I have always said that if you want a performance culture, a true performance culture, then you need to be training everybody to take your job. Plain and simple, right? That way they’ve got that greater, that greater picture up here, right? They’re thinking at this level, this may be their job, but they’re thinking like you as the leader. So when they’re making their decisions, you know, they’re thinking, well, gosh, how does this fit into the bigger picture? And they know it.

Right? If you want a true performance culture, you need to be training everybody to take your job at all times.

Melissa Aarskaug (35:26.156)
Yeah, and I love what you said. There’s, you know, self -development for a job, for a task, and there’s self -development for you as an individual person, right? So your company might pay for you to go to a training to learn a skillset, but that skillset is not just for the company, it’s also for you. So I think looking at personal development and personal growth, there’s two kind of ways to do it is, of course, make sure that what you’re learning benefits your company,

but also yourself, is there something else that you’re passionate about that maybe you’re not in that role, right? So maybe you’re passionate about moving from sales to delivery, right? And you need to learn some technical skills to switch fields. Now, is it the responsibility of the company? Maybe, maybe not. I would suggest sometimes it’s our own responsibility to continue to learn and grow as a professional.

and really find what brings that internal fire and that internal drive that wants us to keep doing more and becoming better and better. So I wanna switch a little bit from the people to the business and talk a little bit about spirituality or a belief in a higher power and how it has its place in the workplace these days. think I see a lot of companies doing

know, lunchtime yoga or bringing massage to the office or prayer rooms or family bonding time rooms. So I want to get your perspective on spirituality in the workplace today.

Dr. James Chitwood (37:05.255)
Yes, fascinating, Melissa. I was going to write my dissertation on that in organizational leadership. On all the things that you just said I was going to and a friend of mine, a provost friend of mine said, Jim, that’s a really great idea for a book. Now, why don’t you write something that you are a passionate about being know a lot about and see will drive you at two o ‘clock in the morning. Keep writing and something that you can get through your dissertation committee because I can assure you that topic is going to run into roadblocks, right?

And so I took it to heart, wrote mine on, well, performance, job satisfaction, and leadership in a sales environment, because that’s who I am.

everybody has, even people who don’t believe in a higher power, most of them believe in a spiritual type of connection of people, right? If they’re educated, they understand the quantum physics of it. Most people don’t understand it at that level, but we all, most of us anyways, bring in some type of spirituality. And I don’t know if you know this,

sure you may, every religion has the same one rule, the golden rule exists in every single religion. They word it differently, but it all means the same thing, which is to take care of your brother, right? Treat others as you want to be treated. And so that whole concept that we are in this together, and when we work together, we are better off, you know, that coexist bumper sticker with all the little symbols on it. I love that one, not on my car, but I really love it because that same mentality

needs to exist within the workplace, which is everybody brings in their own spirituality. And when we can understand that and learn to bring it together, then we are strengthening our social bonds. And again, it is a social bonds that in the end, I believe really drive that team environment and the team environment drives the organization’s performance as a whole. So finding ways to recognize that coexist.

Dr. James Chitwood (39:19.397)
is powerful to the organization’s performance is critical, right? It’s not just a feel -good thing. It literally has tangential value to driving the performance of the organization. Why? Because it hits at the social bonding level, which supports the team and the team drives performance.

Melissa Aarskaug (39:40.214)
Yeah, I love it. want to talk. I love kind of what you were saying because all these these are really basic principles that I would say a lot of us learn in kindergarten, you know, originally and treat others the way you want to be treated and all those kind of principles. And I want to talk about your career and your spiritual beliefs. Have they got guided different decisions for you in your life and business or in how you approach leadership and maybe what those were?

Dr. James Chitwood (40:12.029)
Yeah, well, absolutely. So, you know, religiously, I am a Catholic. have studied every in college. I took every world religion class there was. I find them all fascinating. I truly believe that there is one God and we all call that God by something different to the Native Americans. It was a great spirit, right? I really think that there is a greater energy and we are all part of it. We are all part of that great energy.

How has that belief driven me as a leader? Well, I’ve always treated employees as I wanted to be treated. I always spoke to them as I would want to be treated, spoken to. Now I got to put a caveat to that, which is because I actually believe that one of the mistakes leaders make is they follow the golden rule and they treat others as they want to be, as they want to be treated. And the problem with that is not every employee can respond the same. You may not attach an emotional connection to something because of who you are, but your employee may not.

or may, they may attach an emotional. And so if you approach them as you would want to be treated, they might call you cold and hard. And you’re like, no, I just, I don’t think that there’s an emotional connection to that. Whereas to most people, there is an emotional connection. So I have to check myself there because I’m going to treat others as they want to be treated. And by that, mean, I’m going to treat others as I want to be treated. And by that, I mean, I’m going to recognize who they are and treat them in the way that they need to be treated.

Right? Because I understand the greater value of the team and how it affects the individuals. I will keep a member of the team who might be a B performer, maybe even a B minus on the team, because I recognize that that B performer or B minus performer is lifting everybody up around them. And so as a team, we’re rocking at the A plus level. We got a B player, B minus player, maybe even C plus, whatever, right?

not stellar employee quantitatively, but qualitatively, they bring everybody else up around them. So I’ve always tried to lead understanding that philosophy that we are all connected and that the energy in the workforce is palpable, it is real, and we need to look at the team as individuals and as a whole collective.

Melissa Aarskaug (42:37.058)
Yeah, that’s great. That made me think, sometimes I hear from employees or leaders that they don’t feel like they can be their authentic self at work. have to, you know, if they’re not Christian and they have a Christian boss, they have to, you know, believe in God or if they believe in God and their boss isn’t Christian. So I feel like they struggle sometimes to be able to bring their authentic self to work. So,

What advice do you have for leaders who want to integrate really their spiritual beliefs into their work life and their business practices?

Dr. James Chitwood (43:17.469)
So, you know, everything we’ve discussed is not Christian centric. It’s not Catholic centric, right? is, is people as a whole centric, right? And so I would say they have to be curious. They have to be intellectually truly curious about where those employees are coming from and how it can all work together in order to create a more positive environment where everybody feels welcome. Because again, all the religions

all have the same fundamental philosophies of working together, lifting each other up and living in harmony. And so if we just take those basic principles and we’re curious about how their particular spiritual beliefs might integrate in, then we can do that better. The philosophies of Christianity are not.

mutually exclusive to anybody else’s, right? They’re all the same. Let’s work together. Let’s live in harmony. Let’s lift each other up. Let’s give peace, right? And so a leader can bring that into the workforce without doing it in an oppressive way. If they do it from an intellectually curious way, then they bring everybody along together. And that’s critical.

Melissa Aarskaug (44:35.178)
Yeah, that’s great. I love that. We have covered so much today and so many nuggets of wisdom. Is there anything, Dr. James, you wanna leave with our listeners before we close up?

Dr. James Chitwood (44:50.317)
just, know, if you’re looking for ways to build a positive environment in your workforce, go to leadership is not enough .com. that lastly redirect you to my site, which allows you to pick up the book very easily. There’s a Kindle, a paperback and a hardcover version, whatever your reading, needs are. And it’s really, it’s an operator’s manual. It’s a complete how to, you will walk away with nuggets on how to build a more positive culture.

by focusing on the formal systems and by focusing on the formal systems, we will be lifting up the people. And when we all lift up the people, well, I believe we all thrive.

Melissa Aarskaug (45:29.954)
That’s fantastic, I love that. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. James. We know you’re busy. That’s the Executive Connect podcast, and please follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn. Thank you so much.

Dr. James Chitwood (45:38.055)
Thank you, Melissa.

Dr. James Chitwood (45:47.035)
Awesome, thank you, Melissa.

Melissa Aarskaug (45:48.502)
Thank you for be…