Michael: Hello and welcome to the HaBO Village podcast where we talk about developing the whole leader for the whole business. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: And this is the podcast for entrepreneurs, founders, business owners, leaders like you who are running companies.
Kathryn: Our goal is to encourage you, give you practical tips and tools that you can apply today. And even more importantly, remind you, you're not in this alone.
Michael: Because we believe that you can build a company that's financially successful, fulfilling for you and your team and avoid burnout all at the same time.
Kathryn: We know because we've done it and we've been helping other leaders do it too for over 20 years.
Michael: So welcome to today's show. Let's dive in. Whoa, this is our first episode of 2023.
Kathryn: 2023. Do you remember when you were a kid and if someone said, "You're going to be doing this thing in 2023." You'd have been like, "No way. I'll be dead. That's way too far away."
Michael: I'm always reminded when that question comes up or something like that of when I was in elementary school, early elementary school, and we were allowed to go to summer school for fun in our school district. It was before you came to the United States because I can remember being in Mr. Sweet's class. So that was first and second grade. And we could sign up for all these cool things and you'd go to class and you could sign up for band, you could sign up for fly fishing. I remember doing that one year. Somewhere in the middle of those early to middle seventies. It all fell apart. The funding fell apart and it stopped happening. What year did you come to the United States?
Kathryn: '73.
Michael: And what year did you come to Chico?
Kathryn: '79.
Michael: Yeah. So it was before you got to Chico, right? You might have been in the United States at that point, right in the middle of that. And I remember being in this class that, I don't know why it was cool, but I don't even know what the class was about. But I remember watching a movie, old 16 millimeter movie and it was all black and white and it was about the year 2000. And it was kind of was written to schoolchildren for school kids and stuff like that. But I felt like I was watching something for junior highers or high schoolers or something like that.
Kathryn: Was it like the Jetsons where there was flying cars and stuff?
Michael: There weren't that, but everything was metal. Everybody had the same kind of aluminum sweatsuit type clothing, all that kind of stuff.
Kathryn: The utopian future where everybody's dressed alike.
Michael: It was totally like that. Disneyland created a whole section of what the future would look like back when they opened in 1955 through the early sixties. And I've only seen pictures of it. 'Cause by the time '69, when I got to go Disneyland, it wasn't there anymore. But it was this whole idea of just what all the future would look like. And that was the year 2000.
Kathryn: It's so much more colorful than they ever painted it.
Michael: It was so much better. I mean-
Kathryn: And good, bad and ugly.
Michael: Oh yeah. I mean it's not as utopian. It also has a lot more flair and style and color. The food is better.
Kathryn: We're not eating out of packets,
Michael: We're not eating out of packets.
Kathryn: Delivered from computers.
Michael: But I'll tell you what-
Kathryn: And do you remember Logan's Run?
Michael: I do.
Kathryn: Oh, now we're just dating ourselves.
Michael: No, but the one thing about this movie strip and then it broke three fourths the way through and we never got to see the end of film because nobody could figure out how to fix it. I'm like, today I would've gone, "Give me the film strip. I've got to figure it out."
Kathryn: I can splice this.
Michael: I know how to do this. Let me just do this right now. We'll get back to it because I want to see the ending. The TV in the house, the future they were showing was like a 12-foot tall, 12-foot wide TV. And that to me, I was so into TV in those days, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is Heaven." Okay, this little rant in tangent about 2023, our first episode, we're excited.
Kathryn: It's all just to say happy New Year.
Michael: Happy New Year.
Kathryn: Wherever you find yourself.
Michael: And I will ask this because you've been listening to us, what were those things that you stood out? What do you remember? What are the things that you remember as a kid of what the future would look like? And here we are. Some days it's great and some days it's not. Today we're going to talk about the issue of trust. Now this takes a turn into some, "This kind of sucks, it's a little dark." But we're going to talk about the lack of trust in our society and what you can do.
Because really what we're talking about today, this is something that's really big and it's really been in our hearts lately. I've been thinking about it a lot. And it's this idea of the fact that we're in a post-trust era. And there's many people that say, we entered into a post-trust era somewhere around 2007, 2008 with the financial crisis. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. And what the implications of that have been, right? Is the culture in many ways, culture slide. But we see the implications in several different places. Bam, as I hit the microphone. But I mean, what are some of the things that we were talking about?
Kathryn: So we would just suggest that a lot of the challenges, not every challenge, but a lot of the challenges that we face in business today, are a result of just the incredible low trust and being in this post-trust era that has been ramping up essentially. Trust is degrading regularly.
Michael: In 2016, we know that there was a spike in the term of post-trust, or at least-
Kathryn: Well, in that case it was post-truth, right? So there's a whole thing that is just the post-truth era.
Michael: That's right.
Kathryn: Where it's trying to sort out how do I even discern what is true from... How do I actually get facts and not manipulation?
Michael: Which is a massive implication of entering into a post-trust era. The best way we've always heard and talked and taught about post-trust is trust is when you give people the benefit of the doubt. Post-trust is when you no longer give people the benefit of the doubt. And there's lots of research that citizens, we hit those financial crises in 2007, 2008, the housing stuff.
Kathryn: 2007 and eight, yeah.
Michael: Yeah, we lost the majority of our society, the news, everything else was moving into more antitrust or no trust rather than trust. More questions about, "I'm not going to give you the benefit of doubt." And you can see several things that happened. But an implication of trust leads to, "Okay, well if I can't trust you, what's the truth?"
Kathryn: And if you think about it, just in really practical terms, and these are hard things. We're living in an era as we enter 2023 and it's been this way, it's just ramping up and continuing, that you have to be so careful what you say. Every nuance, everything can be taken the wrong way because people are on high alert. Almost looking for reasons to be frustrated. It's almost like that. If you're working in a company, you're leading a company, you got to be careful. Is this person someone that I could put my hand on their shoulder and it would be okay? Or is this not? Is that okay? Right.
Michael: Well, if you're somebody who's actually physical and you're a hugger or you are somebody like that, I mean-
Kathryn: We're huggers.
Michael: We're huggers.
Kathryn: So it's terrifying.
Michael: And then you get into the place where it's like, "Okay, well is all hugging sexual? Is every time somebody's hugging somebody, 'Oh they're creepy.'" Or is it an actual sign of affection between people who just are friendly and care about each other and say, "I really like you, I value you. I'm so glad to see you." And so now we're backing up because of fear. And in a company that might have done that, especially small companies where it's more of a family culture, you want to do this stuff. You want to be careful because you could get sued. And so you've got the touch stuff. What do you say? As an employee, you could get fired. As a business owner, you could get sued. You could get in this whole era of canceling. Your company can get canceled. People can really just turn on you. And with the amplification of mass media and social media, you could get shredded for a mistake you made 30 years ago that maybe you're not like that anymore. But we assume, "Well if they did it then they're probably like that now."
Kathryn: People don't change. Well, and then you have just the regular stuff of marketing is trusted less. And so it takes more impressions to build your brand and try and figure out how to allow and grow your brand in a way that people would trust you. That's a big deal too. It just takes a lot longer and it's never been easy to build trust and to build a trusted brand.
Michael: Well, I mean, let's face it. Throughout the entire history of any written history, there's always been stories of people who have of been thieves, who've stolen. Crooked business people, Ponzi schemes, which you've got Bernie Madoff, which is the-
Kathryn: Most popular of the Ponzi scheme.
Michael: Of the last how many decades.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: Yeah. And you have that. But well, let's talk about impressions real quick. Here's some stats. It used to be when we started marketing 20 years ago and started our company, a standard set of impressions was it took six to nine touchpoints for somebody to find out who you are and get comfortable enough with you that they would give you a dollar. There would be some kind of purchase. Now we're talking lower end purchases. Higher end purchases take more time and more touchpoints. But things could happen fast. And even larger companies, their numbers were smaller than they are today because in today's world, we're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 15 on the low end.
And we're even talking about numbers of 30, 35 impressions, touchpoints, before somebody's willing to trust you with that buck. Are you a flyby night? We're being hammered with commercials all the time. We're being hammered with ads online all the time. And so, if you are going to even believe somebody's around, somewhere there's a trip in our brains. This is what the impressions is about. It's important to remember this, that you need a certain amount where all of a sudden I am familiar enough with you, I believe you're going to be around because you've been around a while and I've noticed you for a while. So there's a beginning of trust there, awareness and trust. But it just takes longer now.
Kathryn: And we live in an era where because of so many things online, so many debacles, especially over the past several years, we don't know what voices to trust, what news outlets are trustworthy depending on who you talk to. What people are trustworthy. How do I know, again, that what I'm actually getting is true, and how do I deal with the fact that there's not a lot of objective truth out there that everybody's filtering through their own world and always has been.
Michael: Sure.
Kathryn: Right? But everything feels manipulated in some senses. And then you get the political debacles and do we trust the voting system? I mean, there's just so many different places.
Michael: And currently you have things like Elon Musk taking over Twitter and releasing all kinds of files that supposedly implicate the feds, the government, the FBI, Arizona politics, all kinds of stuff. And on and on and on. And there's some people going, "Oh, this is conspiracy. People are making this up." And there's other people going, "Okay, wait a minute, why would he do this? Why would he make it up?" But that story is just typical of a bunch of other places where things are happening to go, "Hey, let's look." There's always been conspiracies. There are legitimate conspiracies.
Kathryn: Watergate. That was one. That eroded some trust in the government a while ago.
Michael: Well, and on a national level-
Kathryn: A minute ago.
Michael: Conspiracies are the reason we have treason laws. If you're committing treason, it's usually some form of a conspiracy or conspiracy to commit treason. And you're conspiring to, but you haven't been able to fully commit a crime, the actual treasonous act. But you're committing, you've-
Kathryn: Conspiring.
Michael: You're conspiring to. Thank you very much.
Kathryn: Yes.
Michael: So you've got these things, all these things that are affecting and we as business owners or future business owners, we're looking at these issues and going, "Okay, I don't want employees because that's just more and more of a hassle or I've got employees, but it's just becoming so much harder and I wish I could do this with less employees. I wish I didn't have them." Some of us still love our employees. We realize that we have to have a team to accomplish our goals. 'Cause if we're dreaming beyond who we are, we can't accomplish really big dreams.
If we're dreaming big and living into what our potential is here, especially as leaders and business owners, and our significant potential to make the world a better place, then we have to dream beyond ourselves. We have to have a team. So some of this antitrust is stopping people from really dreaming big because they're like, "I don't see a way we could do it and I could trust anybody." Partnerships, we talk a lot about partnerships and how those can be really hard, but we need partnerships in business because all great companies that have really done some amazing things. And when we start a company, we usually want to do something significant.
Kathryn: We're hopeful.
Michael: Have been partnerships. So how do you put together a partnership that works? We talk about the book, The Partnership Charter, and we've been talking about that for whoa, 12, 13 years now.
Kathryn: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I was thinking about even as we were preparing for this and we were looking at a book from 2008 that we refer to all the time, is there are profound things that have been written that just because they weren't written yesterday doesn't mean they're not completely relevant, right.
Michael: Such as?
Kathryn: Such as like we reference, and we'll talk about a little bit more today, the Speed of Trust that Stephen MR Covey wrote. So this would be Stephen R Covey was the dad who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. His son Stephen MR Covey is the one who took over his company in the later years and developed the partnership between he and Franklin, who became Franklin Covey and did all those amazing things, grew the company tremendously. And this book, Speed of Trust that kind of breaks apart and decodes and then reconstructs, what is trust made up of? How do we lose it? How do we regain it? Dispelling some of the myths. I mean, it is such a profound book.
Michael: And I want to say right now that the premise that we're talking about today is while, even though all of this stuff is really hard, even though you might look at culture and you go, "This is crazy." There are people fleeing California because it's like, "I can't do business here anymore." From Hewlett Packard to Elon Musk saying, "We're leaving the state." To other folks that are small companies and small families and everything else going, "I got to go do it somewhere else." And not all states are easy and simple, but there's so many things like that, that are going on.
And so you get into this place where we are talking about the Speed of Trust and the premise is we can actually build a company that's resilient. There are things we can actually do if we're thinking about it to control. Really, let's talk about this. There's only two things you can do. You can control and you can influence. And both of them are about your own behavior. You can control your own behavior and build a culture that is strong. You can influence your culture in your company. And when you do this, this is going to create really a resilience or an insulation. So this premise that we're talking about today, is you can create a layer of protection or insulation around your company while at the same time building a healthier and more resilient company and a more profitable company.
Because when you start to do this and you think, "Okay, what can you do?: This is really the conversations we've been having lately around the office is this, "Okay, these are all the implications of having a post-trust era." When people said, "Ah, okay, it's a post-trust era, we trust less than we do trust. What are the implications?" All the stuff we've been talking about are the implications and they're just continuing to increase. But you can control and influence your own company and you can strengthen that company. Almost like having an old ancient wall and moat around your building where you-
Kathryn: I am fortressing.
Michael: Where you let people in through the drawbridge and you choose who comes in and who doesn't. From customers to employees, everything else. You can build a culture where you get to go in and safe. It might be even like if you take that analogy even more, your hometown in York.
Kathryn: It's brilliant.
Michael: Brilliant city. People lived inside the walls. Many people did. And you could put 20, 30,000 people in there and there was commerce and business and everything else going inside the walls, that would protect them from all kinds of crazy stuff during times of conflict. But when things are good or on a good day or anything, you can open up all the gates and everybody can go out into the farmland, out in the outside and you can do all this work and trade and travel and travel to other lands and all this kind of stuff that would happen.
Kathryn: Float down the ooze.
Michael: Float down the ooze.
Kathryn: Because who doesn't want a river named ooze?
Michael: I mean, right.
Kathryn: Favorite river.
Michael: But this whole concept, this analogy of, "I have the safety to go out and do work in the real world, but then I can retreat back into a place that I know is safe and if things get too crazy, I've intentionally created a culture." Because what we don't want is we don't want to create walls around ourselves and our company that totally insulate us and create barriers to the world. And there's no interaction with the outside world. But we do have to have a measure of safety and security. And we're like, "No, that's not going to happen in my company."
Because I don't want to come to work. You don't want to come to work. I would assume that if you're listening today, you don't want to go to work or if you run a company, you don't want to go have a thing that every day is full of, nobody trusts you, nobody trusts your leadership, nobody trusts your decisions, everybody's questioning everything. You're always having to fight for what you want. Whether you're an employee or you are the leader or whatever, you want a place that is supportive, encouraging, that everybody knows they're rowing in the same direction. Everybody can trust the man or woman on the right or the left and that you're all moving together and that you don't have to watch your back.
Kathryn: Well, and I think when we live in a place where there's low trust, it is just energy draining. When you're having to do that kind of battle all the time, you don't get to invest your energy in the best things because you're too busy trying to protect and shore up and make sure that you're being ultra careful and all of the things that just make it super hard. And we've seen that even. I mean, you deal with some general types of things that don't even necessarily have to do with the post-trust era, but have to do with when transitions happen in leadership at companies for clients. And you have to rebuild trust. And so some things that used to be super easy to accomplish are just harder because you're rebuilding trust because that person doesn't have the same connection that you had with the previous whatevers. And so, even those things are just... They're real and they just require so much energy.
Michael: And I mean, we do this podcast for you as the listeners, because we want you to succeed. We want you to be successful. When we meet you in different places, the conversation for us is, "Man, that's great. How are you doing? How can we help? What does that look like?" And we've got one gentleman recently, we just got a text from, who has read the book, listens to the podcast. And I have periodically, because he lives in our area. I've had lunch with him a couple of times a year. And we really like this young man. He's a young man for us. He's in his early thirties. He's an architect and he's probably listening right now so I won't mention your name, but way to go. You know who I'm talking about.
And he just let us know that he just crossed a really big financial mark for 2022 in his company that he's been working on a long time, that was really significant and really showed how much he was working and how hard he was working. But in today's world, I mean a single entrepreneur, not single person. He has a wife, it's wonderful. But a one-man shop. One person shop. And just kind of like, "How do we do this?" And with the recession and with finance, the prime rate and interest rates going up and people spending less money on certain things, especially building new houses or whatever. How do you do that? And that's kind of phenomenal. And we're doing this for you because we really want to see more entrepreneurs like you thrive. More business owners thrive. That's why we wrote the book.
Kathryn: Yep, definitely.
Michael: Okay, so when we talk about this, we talk about the fact that all of this stuff reiterate what can you do about it? Your culture in your company is more important than ever, more important than ever. You have to understand how trust or understand that trust, how it's lost and how to build it becomes super important. And then when we talk about that, then there are a host of other things that we talk about on other podcasts and stuff and then even some things we write about in the book, where you're talking about these ideas that what goes into building that trust also. What are the fundamentals of that trust? So in the time we have left today, let's talk about some very specific things on how do we understand what trust is more, and what do we do? So there's the three different parts of trust that we talk about. What are those, Kathryn?
Kathryn: So we talk about competence, character, and then caring is another one. And I think before we even unpack those, I was glancing back through this nice old, ancient now book from 2008. And there are myths that live around trust that I think are worth talking about. One of them is that this concept of developing trust it's soft. It's not one of those measurable, tangible things. It's soft. And the truth is that it's hard, it's real. It's actually quantifiable. And when you build trust, you build efficiency. You lower costs, I mean all of those things. So trust is not a soft kind of feely concept.
Michael: I like that statement that it's a real thing. It's hard, it's quantifiable.
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: Trust is quantifiable.
Kathryn: Yep. It measurably affects speed and cost. Another thing is that trust is built solely on integrity. So there's a lot of conversation about integrity and actually trust is based not just on integrity, which is a character quality, but also on competence. Your ability to actually do what you say you're going to do. So that's an important thing. Another one is you either have trust or you don't. "I either trust you or I don't trust you." And actually trust can be both created and destroyed and there are levels of trust. So that's important to know. There's an assumption and a myth that once trust is lost, it can't be restored. That one is-
Michael: That couldn't be any further from the truth.
Kathryn: And it's not easy to restore trust, but there are specific tangible ways to do it and it can be rebuilt. Another myth is that you can't teach trust and obviously we're talking about teaching you a little bit more about trust. So we disagree with that.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: It can be effectively taught, it can be learned and it can become something that is strategic for you as you think about your leadership and how you're relating to your humans in your life. Another myth is trusting people is just too risky. And he would argue, and I love this, that not trusting people is the greater risk. If you live in a world where you can't trust anyone, that is a worrisome, exhausting world. And that's really risky.
Michael: And I would take that and expand on it a little bit going, "I don't need to trust everybody. I trust some people." But the reality is, let me ask this, is the company culture that you have, the relationship you have with your people, whether you work somewhere in leadership, aspiring to be in leadership or you're thinking about starting a company. But let's talk about it. If you have a company or you're working wherever you're working, is the tone, the tenor of the relationships you have at work with the people, is it more than 51% trustworthy? Is trust there more than 51% of the time or is it less? Because if you're living in it less, even though you can say, "There are some people that I can trust." Having a company, a place where you spend 40, 50 hours a week-
Kathryn: Or 60.
Michael: Or 60.
Kathryn: Or 70 sometimes.
Michael: Which we rarely do. How could you be in a place? It's exhausting to live in that kind of a culture that is just antitrust. And when you come into this idea of, "We can build a culture." You have control over that you need to build a culture that is more trustworthy, it becomes a safe place that gives you energy.
Kathryn: Yeah. Well, and I think if someone says, "People either trust you or they don't trust you, and there's nothing you can do about it." That's a cop out because there's a lot you can do about it and you're responsible actually as the leader for establishing, creating, developing, growing trust both with your vendors, your clients, your employees. I mean, that is one of the things that's on your shoulders as a leader. So if you are of the mindset that trust is just one of those intangible things, "Either you trust me or you don't." It's like, "Nope." Let's talk about what makes up trust.
Michael: Yeah, well and the idea that trust can't be rebroken, or I mean it can't be rebuilt. Once it's lost, it's lost. The other side of that coin, or at least a companion to that is yes, it can be. And if you understand the elements of trust-
Kathryn: Yeah, the anatomy of it.
Michael: You can actually accelerate how fast you can rebuild trust. You can build it amazingly fast compared to somebody who doesn't understand the anatomy and it may feel like forever you can't or you might actually, in some cases people don't rebuild trust because they don't follow the structure of trust. And what does it look like? They don't understand it, so they don't even know how to rebuild it. Whatever side of the equation you're on trying to rebuild a relationship or create a culture. Now we've got other podcasts and stuff in the past that we've done on the elements. There's 13 behaviors, there's competency, there's character. And the competency is do you have, especially in work, do you have the job? Do you have the skillset? And at least a minimum competency, whatever that's set at for the position you're in, the job you have, can you meet the minimum requirements? And then hopefully you as a leader are setting those minimum requirements clearly.
You have a clear set. So how do you build that first? Here's a tip, one of the things you do is have a very clear job description with clear metrics on what it means for your folks to do that. That's something that when you hire is really powerful and it's really powerful as you're managing people and trying to make sure that they're growing in your organization, they're more successful, they're more helpful to you to build a company that's running well and smooth. And then you can assess that and then as they change job descriptions or positions or they take on new tasks, as you're clearly articulating what are the requirements, what are the tasks, what are the skill requirements needed? So let's define those skills, and then what are the metrics we're going to use for success or failure or in between where you're not doing as well, you're not hitting the minimum requirements? That's a competency issue. That's a great way of looking at it. Character is, now this is interesting because when we say trust is...
Kathryn: Competence, character, and caring.
Michael: Right. And we say trust is quantifiable, we are also saying that not only competency is quantifiable, but we're saying character is quantifiable, which means we have to talk about character as being some very specific things. Really in a simple way, we talk about the core values. Core values are one of the tools that we use to evaluate whether somebody is actually aligned character-wise with the company.
Kathryn: Yep. We also talk about good judgment is this person... Which I mean you could probably argue that's a competence issue, but it's actually both, right? I mean, judgment is both in your own inner world as well as in the tasks that you perform, but how you relate to people. All of those things like, "Do I have good judgment? Am I aware of my surroundings? Am I paying attention? Do I understand implications? Do I have an ability to see beyond what's just in front of me?" There's just so many components to it.
Michael: Well, incompetence often involves knowledge and a skill. So something we know and then something we can do, actively do with that. Whether it's writing a letter and negotiating a contract or building a widget, there's a skillset. So you take that knowledge and the skillset, you might have the fundamental skills to build a widget or negotiate a contract, but if you don't have the proper knowledge, you might end up in the wrong place because you're doing all of that without having the plan, the blueprint, the skills, the necessary knowledge and information, sometimes context.
You miss a piece because you didn't know everything you needed to know. But then you get into this idea of taking the knowledge and the skillset and applying good judgment to that. Now all of a sudden you've got, wow, that's a multiplier that we've seen over time and we've learned to quantifiably measure good judgment. So now you can measure competency, you can measure character, you can measure good judgment, and if you don't know how to do this just ask. We've got some other stuff we've talked about, but this is critical. This is like these are fundamental things that you can learn and teach your team so they excel and grow and bear some of the burden of running a company from your shoulders.
Kathryn: And help you. If you've got a team that is helping establish trust with everyone they interact with, it's golden, right?
Michael: It's so much easier. Because you know your team's lifting that load too.
Kathryn: Yeah. So we have to wrap this one up today, but as we talk about trust and it won't be the only time we do it, there's incredible elements of realizing that we do live and have been for a long time, and it's just accelerating. We live in a post-trust era. We live in a place where people don't give you the benefit of the doubt. People can often assume the worst. So how do you as a leader, shore yourself up, shore your company up, to be kind of a safe haven essentially for trust? And studying trust and understanding how it develops, I mean, it is so critical because it's not just your company that it affects, it's every aspect of your life, it's all of your relationships, it's with your family, it's with your spouse and your kids and your siblings and your parents. I mean, there's so much to it. So it is a worthwhile endeavor to learn the anatomy of trust to work through how do I build trust? How do I retain trust? How do I make sure that trust is a critical component within my organization?
Michael: Well, and one of the things that we didn't add today that's just important to say, is not only learning the character of trust, but what are the competencies that you as a leader or your leaders in your company, folks in your company need to build? What are those competencies that are actually going to... Specifically, what can I measure? What do I need to look out that's going to build the company and build trust or build a strong culture that's based on your core values and trust? Can you do that? Yes. And again, it's quantifiable and we've broken that down. We work with a tool that measures five different characteristics, five major characteristics and 18 competencies that are sub competencies. So if you look at those 18 competencies, all of a sudden we're measuring the things that you can work on that are going to help the culture and your business be successful.
And we know for sure that that works. We've got tons of data and tons of experience in that. And then on the other side, knowing trust as an element and what that looks like and building that culture and that competence, the character, and then adding to the fact that you care. And so many of you care. So many of you leaders care. So this is to help you build what we call a Passion and Provision company. So you are building something that it is more resilient, more profitable to all the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in the world. At the same time, something that's also enjoyable to be a part of and really enjoyable for you to work in and labor in, in the sense that labor brings a positive end result that you can be proud of and you've got fruit that you can enjoy at the end of the day.
Kathryn: Well, and this is so important to us that we do workshops and this whole element of trust is a really critical piece that we talk about within those workshops. So if this is a conversation you want to have, definitely reach out to us. But this is so critical. It's so critical.
Michael: She's just kind of left speechless.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Thank you for joining us today. This was really critical on this whole idea, as Kathryn was saying, it was critical, on this idea of trust and what's going on in our world, and how do we battle as business owners and strengthen our organizations so that we're more protected and resilient in a world that's full of what we call VUCA, the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that is just rising around us and throws us around so often, like a small boat in a stormy sea? And what we want to do is build, give you the tools and the encouragement.
And the motivation to really be able to say, "I can have a ship that is more protected. I can have a company that has walls around it that are not tortured by just the whims of marauders coming around and trying to steal and pillage your company." When sometimes that's the way it feels with lawsuits and rogue employees and rogue government stuff that's going on. And you just get nailed. The government gives you a tax credit and takes 75% of it back in taxes and they're like, "Hey, aren't we great because we gave you a tax credit?" These things are going on around us and we want you to be prepared and we want you to have the stamina so that you can survive and succeed and thrive in the midst of the fight of running a company and bringing good to the world. We really appreciate you, and thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: We'll talk to you later. Thanks a lot.
Kathryn: Bye-bye.
