Negative work culture? Tips for fostering positivity. Gerald J. Leonard

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Well, hello listeners.

He would often sneak into his sister's closet to play her red guitar, which

absolutely sparked his passion for music.

Well today he is a professional bass player and an accomplished

expert in project management.

He has authored several books and cleverly has incorporated music

terminology and scenarios, which for me, absolutely brilliant.

I particularly enjoyed his work.

In his book, culture is the Base Seven Steps to Creating High Performance Teams.

I absolutely loved it.

One of his quotes really stands out to me.

"Vision drives and develops values".

So indeed, both vision and values are essential for fostering a

positive and productive culture.

He serves today as the CEO of Turnberry Premier, and is the founder of the Leonard

Productivity Intelligence Institute.

His expertise has been featured on NPR and Jack Canfield Show.

Good for you.

Yay.

But I especially loved , his Ted Ex Talk.

Loved it.

Gerald, you are truly remarkable, and I'm thrilled to have you as a

guest today on your positive imprint.

Welcome to the show, Gerald J. Leonard.

Gerald J. Leonard: Well, Catherine, thank you so much for having me.

I'm really happy to be here.

I love the intro.

Oh, yay.

Well, it's you.

It's you.

So, uh, it was

Gerald J. Leonard: guitar right behind me.

That's the, that's the little red guitar up there.

Oh, it's, it's,

I loved hearing that story and reading the story,

and I love that it's behind you.

That's fabulous.

Oh, what a remarkable memory.

And to have that and just knowing that you had something that you love

to do, sneaking in your sister's closet and playing that guitar.

So again, welcome to the show and we wanna learn all about you.

You have so much to share.

So let's go to that red guitar.

Just write quick while it's on our plate right here, so, sure, sure.

Gerald J. Leonard: So I was actually taking piano lessons, which I did not

like, and my older sister played piano.

Um, mom and dad had it for her.

And um, again, it wasn't something I really liked that I enjoyed.

I was, I guess, fascinated with the guitar and, but I didn't own one, my sister did.

So I would sneak in and grab it and then play.

And I was just kind of fiddling around playing stuff.

And, um, as I say in my TEDx, uh, one day she caught me playing the guitar.

She was never practicing or playing it, so she let me have it in more ways than one.

You know, she kinda, I'm gonna have it for taking my guitar,

but here you can have it.

I'm not gonna use it.

And I started like really practicing it and playing by ear.

. I had a few friends that were musicians, right?

Kids, but one played in church and he was like, he was younger

than I was, but he was way above his years and his ability to play.

I mean, he played like Jimi Hendrix, and I'm not kidding, he

was a fascinating guitar player.

So I realized we're putting the band together.

I'm not gonna be the guitar player

sew up.

So I, so I, you know, moved over to the bass and, you know, when you're playing

the bass, you're playing the whole song and you're basically supporting everyone.

So you need to know the beginning, the end, and while everybody else is doing

their thing, you're cooling down the thing and you're, you focus on just

keeping the groove and keeping the sound and keeping the music moving forward.

And it was at a time where I grew up in Lakeland, Florida, which is in the United

States and Florida, uh, central, uh, between Tampa, and Orlando, uh, and around

1974, when I was about 12 years old, they created the Lakeland Civic Center.

And so it was the first time any major bands could come into that area.

And at that time it wasn't like now where you got a mortgage or house to

go to a concert, you could actually do a couple of lawns, you know,

do some chores and buy a ticket.

And so we would.

, as friends, you know, get tickets and we would go, and I don't remember if

there was even any seat assignments.

I just remember we, the, the auditorium or the stadium was so big, we would stand

next to the stage and we saw the Brothers Johnsons, we saw Earth, wind and Fire.

We saw the OJs we saw the Commodores, and we saw them up close.

And I remember just seeing different bass players do things.

And I would go back home and I had these, uh, speaker headphones that I'd

put on and the plug into my base so I wouldn't keep my family up because they,

they, they, they wouldn't allow that.

And, um, I would practice and I would probably stay up to three or four

o'clock in the morning and just play because I was so impressed with,

and so I learned a lot from that.

But then I had to, you know, if I wanted to get better, I had

realized I needed to take lessons.

So I went back to work and made some money.

'cause you know, I was the youngest of six.

Right.

And during that time, mom and dad provided what we needed, right?

And I had a great childhood.

But if I wanted to do all this extra stuff, I had to kind

of make that happen, right?

And so I was happy that because of that I learned the value of working

for lessons, like working and making money to then pay someone else to teach

me something that I needed to know.

And I never forgot that lesson as a kid.

And I think sometimes that's a really important lesson for kids to learn.

But anyway, that really moved me forward.

You know, I had a band I practiced, and so as I went through life, those

three lessons became , the foundational principles in which I live my life.

Whatever I got into, whether it was becoming an author,

I would practice writing.

I would look for a coach and I would look for a band like who are other writers

that I can go talk to about writing?

I got into project management.

Okay, how do I practice project management?

Who can I learn from and what organizations are out there

that I could call my band?

As I've become a CEO and a founder, I have said, okay, what are the things

that CEOs and founders practice to get really good at, and what are the

critical skills they need to have?

Who should I learn from to be a better CEO and a better founder?

And who's my band?

What organizations, what programs, where can I go to find people

who are doing what I'm doing?

And so I've literally leveraged those three principles I learned as a kid

to help me throughout my entire life.

And that was practice.

Find a coach.

Find a band.

That's, that's fabulous.

And I love the, the

transformation that the base provided for you.

But it was when you said that basically the base is everything

within the orchestra, you have to the beginning, the middle, the end.

And you said something, you said, and I wanna find that

quote 'cause I wrote it down.

"The base is the foundation of the orchestra".

And for you really, that base became your foundation in life with the

practice and then the values and so on.

And you also said, and this, this is something that I am going to

write out, I'm going to pass out to teachers that I work with and other

community members that I work with.

You said about values, "enshrine them to practice".

Yes, you trying them into practice and that's how you

lived your life from early on.

Gerald J. Leonard: My mom and dad both were pillars in our lives,

and it's definitely in my life.

And I can remember, you know, both of 'em are gone now, but I can remember,

, just, just visualizing dad getting up and he, , he had his own business.

He, , basically poured concrete.

He did construction work from that standpoint of, of pouring

the foundation of homes and driveways and things like that.

And, and he probably did three or four or five projects a week.

Uh, the phone was always ringing and on Sundays you couldn't touch the

phone because people were calling in.

That's when you had a cord next to the phone.

But I remember at five 30 in the morning him always being there and

getting up and always coming home.

And that just that rock of a foundation.

And providing I grew up in the sixties and I learned about all

of the racial things that were going on in America in college.

I mean, obviously in high school I experienced some of those things, but

where I grew up, and it was a mixed area.

I was so well protected and cared for that the reality of what was

happening in the world wasn't my reality growing up as a kid.

And mom was a seamstress she worked for very high end stores because if

she made a suit, you couldn't tell if it was something that she made

or something that she bought and

altered.

She had that, that skill and she taught my sisters , and so the idea of really

working on being an expert, , carrying your own, being dependable, , always

being there for your family no matter what, uh, showing up, , whatever

skill you go after, become the best that you can be at that skill.

Those were all things that I learned from my parents as I watched them, , raise

the six of us during that particular time when, , a lot of opportunities

and things along that line weren't made available to them, but they made a way

out of, as they would say, out of no way.

And they, but they did it in such a very graceful

and loving manner.

And, , I didn't have any issues or I feel like, well, why aren't

you guys helping me with this?

I felt honored that, okay, hey, I'm being taken care of, but I wanna

play music and if I wanna buy my own instrument or I wanna do this,

I gotta go out and work for it.

And that was the principle, that was the value I learned.

And I used that quote because, the gentleman who wrote Good To

Great Built to Last, jim Collins wrote good To Great Built to Last.

And one of the things he found about great companies was that

they had a core set of values

that became the foundation of their organization.

In other words, those values weren't plaques on a wall they

were things that they lived.

And, uh, they, when they interviewed people, they interviewed people and

they judge them based on those values.

When they work with suppliers, they judge them based on their values.

When they focus on their customer service, they looked at their values and say, this

is how we're going to treat our customers.

This is how we're gonna treat our employees.

And so, as they were growing the business, everyone around them developed those,

those core values, and that really became the three first principles of my

book, vision, values, and then buy-in.

Because you gotta have people that are gonna buy into those values.

But, you know, having those core values are really critical to, to,

uh, family success, to a business's success, to an organization's success.

It's really, really important to have, uh, strong values that you apply.

I, I agree.

And I, I loved this book, so because, and I know you didn't

like it as much you said that in your prologue on your third book.

I loved culture is the base and your seven steps, because

the way you really used music.

So I, I love learning through creative different ways, right?

So you bringing in the music and the different instruments and the conductor,

and I love how you, when you were bringing in the vision and trying to

conceptualize, helping the reader to conceptualize that everybody needs to

work on this vision, but it can't always, you can't make it stale, such as the

conductor at the Cincinnati Ballet when you were playing bass for the Nutcracker

and the Nutcracker's played all the time.

But how does a conductor make it interesting and exciting?

And he did.

And they do.

And it's not the same every time.

I think that that was fabulous conceptualization and so let's talk

about how you reshaped your, your bass strings and went a different direction

Gerald J. Leonard: that whole process was something that, uh, evolved over time.

And so here's what happened is, you know, I finished my degree,

uh, my master's in Cincinnati.

I moved to New York.

I played in New York for a while and I also was a part of a church and started

really doing a lot of spiritual work.

Um, got married, had a couple of kids, and as I'm going down this process, I

realize, you know, I really miss music.

, full time, but now I have two kids.

And again, go back to my vision of my dad, who was what always there.

And so I thought, , I had some opportunities to go on the

road or go here or go there.

And I thought, you know, I'm gonna stay and work locally and I'm gonna

supplement by getting into IT.

And in fact, at the time, if you could spell the word, IT, they'd let you in.

And so I was able to get in.

And what I realized when I first picked up the computer, because probably by at

And once I got into it and I had someone mentor and coach me again, right?

, and I read a bunch of books around it and I figured out how to practice it.

And I realized that playing music all these years had

prepared me for technology.

Because it's, you know, it's kinetic, so you're typing or you're working with it.

It's, , very, very conceptual because, coding, uh, theory, and then you,

it's visual because you see the, the effects of the coding on the screen

when , it's when Windows came online.

And so it was, quickly, music quickly allowed me to connect the dots of

what technology was and how it worked.

And it was very logical.

Just like classical music.

Classical music is extremely logical in the way everything is

put together, the theory and so on.

So I used that same concept to really understand technology.

But then as I was doing it, I realized that as a musician I was, and especially

as a bass player and working with the bands that I was part of, I was always

the one kind of organizing things.

I was the one that was kind of like, Hey, this is what

we're gonna do in the practice.

This is how we're gonna do things, and so on.

And so I realized that in the business world project

management was what I was doing.

And I would always also being in an organization, even when I was

in the, doing some of the spiritual things, if something was chaotic,

I'd come in and go, oh, we gotta do this, this, that, and the other.

We gotta put this in place that in place, and boom, it's all

organized and now let's go.

, it wasn't work for me.

So when I decided to take technology and combine it with project management, I,

I actually stopped working because now I'm actually playing, I'm doing what I

love to do and I'm doing something that's very natural for who I am as a person

and how music played a part of that.

And I just took off.

I, I, again, practice, I found coaches, I got involved with, , enterprise

project management, and I started doing projects for the National

Archives and for Geico and for Del Monte and for, , DDOD organizations and

pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.

And, and I was, it was fascinating because I just needed to be the expert

in the project management concepts.

But then I would walk into the door and they would go, okay, we

gotta teach you about our business.

So I would have them teach me about the, the business, and then I apply

these concepts to their business to make their business better.

Again, you know, that was fun for me.

How do we organize it and get it working and get everybody on the

same page and get every playing, playing the same sheet of music?

And so that, that was what consulting was for me, and I fell in love with it.

I still, I still have clients where I'm on retainer or even what

my company as I'm building out my strategy and we're starting to go into

the UK and we're going into Canada, and I have visions of us going into

Africa and, and over into Singapore.

I'm using these same principles and frameworks to kind of create

a strategy and organize the group to together and leveraging

technology to make it all happen.

Again, it was a lot of the foundation of music.

And the arts that allowed me to take all of that background.

And in fact, when I was in college, one of my teachers said,

why aren't you a math major?

Yeah.

I said, why?

I'm like, it was an elective.

I'm like, I don't like math.

She goes, but you're so good at it.

And I, and I equated that I go back to music because having to read music count,

, process time signatures and so on.

And so that kind of puts me on a bandwagon or put me on soapbox,

if you will, when schools.

You know, take music out because of economics.

Right.

I think they do a major disservice to society.

Yeah.

Because there's so much that kids and even adults can learn and grow

from, from experiencing the arts.

And if you think about some of the greatest minds out there, you know Albert,

Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, and there's a ton of others.

I'm writing on my third book my next series is gonna be the

DNA of Growth Strategies.

And we're gonna talk about all these inventors who were, I

can't say closet musicians, but they were musicians as well.

Einstein was a violinist.

Henry Ford owned one of the, he was a violinist and won, owned one of the

largest violin collections in the United States with all these Italian violins.

Winston Churchill was a prolific painter, and he was in the arts, but that, that

concept allowed them to connect their right and left brain to together and

developed these principles that they then were able to take out into the

world and solve real world problems because they had studied the arts.

Going back to music and that word foundation, , music Yes.

The foundation, it has built you, it built these other, people, so let's talk

about vision drives and develops values.

You and I both have been in places, we've been in schools, we've been

in businesses where you walk in and you either feel the, oh my gosh,

there's such a negative culture here.

You feel it.

It's not something you have to study and or you feel the positivity and

you feel the workmanship and the critical thinking and you feel it

as soon as you walk into a place.

Same with a department store, right?

You don't wanna go back to that department store if you felt that negative culture.

How does leadership build that from the foundation?

Gerald J. Leonard: Right.

It, it really does have to start from that foundation.

And it really, it really starts with the leader.

If you have a leader that is, . Positive and open-minded and, , inclusive in

their thinking and looking at, , making a difference and adding value,

then , their values are gonna be a part of who they are, and you're gonna

feel that expression in them, right?

But if you walk into an organization where it's cutthroat,

it's all about the bottom line.

It's all about profits, it's all about this.

And then the customer's really not, the main thing.

And the, the employees are not treated properly, so they're not really happy.

So they're not gonna treat the customers happy.

And, you know, it's that whole negative vibe again that was why

I re, I turned my first book.

Uh, culture is the base, right?

Because when you walk and when you listen to a really good song and you

hear the bass line, you immediately know, oh, that's funk, that's jazz,

that's classical, that's rock, that's r and b, whatever that is.

And you feel, it's like you feel it in your gut and you feel it in your soul.

But it, but a business's culture or organization's culture is the same way.

And for most of the times it's, sometimes it's hard to put words to.

And I was able to kind of dissect and do research and find those

seven words that I, that to me made up what culture was all about.

But at the end of the day, all those words kind of come together and they

create a vibe or a groove or a feel.

And like you said, when you walk into that store, you feel, , the vibe of that

store and what you're feeling emotionally is that culture that's going on.

Definitely.

, I really took a lot of notes on your book 'cause you have so much in it, in the book

and too much for us to discuss and readers need to go and read your book anyway.

But you have how to acclimate the values, your core values, aspirational,

the permission to play, which I think needs to really be explained

because that is, I think, a huge, huge value that's not practiced enough.

And the other your accidental values,

Gerald J. Leonard: well, you know, the, the, the reason I came up with

those is that a lot of companies talk about their core values, but yet.

, when you bring people in, if you're not hiring based on your values

and people are bringing different other attitudes in, then they begin

to bring in other values, right?

So you may say, my core values are we're gonna treat the customer right, we're

gonna do this, we're gonna do that.

And you do the other.

But if you hire some key people and they're much more just about the

bottom line, then you start getting these values from these personalities

creeping into your organization, and then you have little silos or little

fiefdoms that that, and then you start seeing that the organization's

actually fighting against itself.

Right?

And, and I always think about it this way.

How, how do you have a, a winning football team?

Well, a winning football team, , in America it's American football.

If you have 11 guys on the field and they're all thinking the same way, and

they're all moving in the same direction.

. That's when you're gonna have a winning team and they're emotionally connected and

they're, and as they're moving and, and, but if you have a team where, half of

the guys are running eastward on the field and other guys are running westward or

somebody's running southward and they're all running in different directions,

you're like, that is a chaotic team.

But that's exactly what happens emotionally and culturally

in a lot of organizations.

Imagine your company where you have, you're pointing everyone southward, or

northward and there's the North Star.

That's where we're going.

But you have the finance teams, they're running south, right?

Or the CIO, they're running, they're running westward

or, or the technology group.

And then you really, you, you step back and you go, wait a minute.

My team's running all over the place.

We're not running in the same direction.

And so when I talk about the idea of these core values and

accidental values and aspirational values, it's all about alignment.

Because if you have a great vision and the CEO or the founder should have a vision

of where he wants his organization to go.

And then it's a matter of sharing your story over and over and over

again to share where you want to go.

Because when you share stories, you get people's heads, hearts, and hands.

That's why we love movies and so on.

And that's why it's such a billion dollar business.

It's 'cause we love stories because stories move us.

Right?

And many times if you want to make a movement happen, develop a core story

around it that people can dig into.

Because once they dig into the story, you got 'em.

You, you got their minds.

And once they understand the story, you got their hearts.

And once you got their head and their hearts, you got their hands because

now they're engaged in the process.

And so a big part of this whole culture and and values piece is also

around the stories that you tell.

And that's why I think it's the third, the fourth value or the fourth

step in my process, which is vision, values, buy-in and in stories.

Mm-hmm.

That's why that's so important.

Join me next time for part two with Gerald J. Leonard,

where he shares more about his music and living with Vertigo.

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