Text us. Share your thoughts. Ask Questions. We would love to hear from you.
Ready to confront the glaring cracks in the foundations of our society? Join John Ballinger and Douglas Ford, as we wrap up our series with an unflinching look at the crumbled state of faith, family, businesses, and government. This episode is not just a discussion; it's a call to action for all current and aspiring leaders to recognize the dire need for resilience in mending the broken pillars of our community.
Witness the convergence of various societal shifts as we analyze the transformative trends in family dynamics and the quest for diversity in the workplace that is redefining our norms. Our conversation sheds light on the pervasive leadership issues plaguing our most revered institutions. We tackle the lack of robust leadership succession planning and the critical development of decision-making skills that, if unaddressed, could spell disaster for the continuity of any organization or community.
As we emphasize the significance of rebuilding trust within leadership, we illuminate the surprising lack of political trust and its implications for democracy. We reveal how a leader's self-assessment can be a powerful tool for fostering change and setting a positive example for the generations to come. By looking at the collective role we all play, this episode serves as a vital resource for anyone ready to shoulder the responsibility of impactful leadership and steer our society back to solid ground.
Text us. Share your thoughts. Ask Questions. We would love to hear from you.
Ready to confront the glaring cracks in the foundations of our society? Join John Ballinger and Douglas Ford, as we wrap up our series with an unflinching look at the crumbled state of faith, family, businesses, and government. This episode is not just a discussion; it's a call to action for all current and aspiring leaders to recognize the dire need for resilience in mending the broken pillars of our community.
Witness the convergence of various societal shifts as we analyze the transformative trends in family dynamics and the quest for diversity in the workplace that is redefining our norms. Our conversation sheds light on the pervasive leadership issues plaguing our most revered institutions. We tackle the lack of robust leadership succession planning and the critical development of decision-making skills that, if unaddressed, could spell disaster for the continuity of any organization or community.
As we emphasize the significance of rebuilding trust within leadership, we illuminate the surprising lack of political trust and its implications for democracy. We reveal how a leader's self-assessment can be a powerful tool for fostering change and setting a positive example for the generations to come. By looking at the collective role we all play, this episode serves as a vital resource for anyone ready to shoulder the responsibility of impactful leadership and steer our society back to solid ground.
At First Lead U. We want to be able to impact leadership and rebuild trust.
Announcer:Welcome to First Lead U, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.
John Ballinger:Hello America and welcome to First Lead U where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders. Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger.
John Ballinger:Hello world. My name is John Ballinger. With First Lead U, I'm here with my trusted sidekick, Mr Douglas Ford, my co-host. Mr Ballinger, how are you today? I am well. It's been a last week. It was a good week, filled with different twists and turns. We're going to be talking about some of the kind of a wrap-up of this block of different episodes that we put into. Episodes that we put into, uh, firstly, Jude, you started doing these blocks to try and get our leaders to learn how to move forward with different aspects of leadership, because there's so many of them. But today is kind of a culmination or an ending to a block that we've been working on. And do you mind, uh, uh, kind of kind of taking that block that we did and putting it into focus for the team so we'll know what we're going to be. I can announce what we're doing forward and the word of the week and all that.
Douglas Ford:Sure, absolutely. I think the last few episodes, I would say, if you go back about three or four episodes our interview with Mr Felix Nader, then we talked about the idea of how to be a bad leader. We also talked about some of the ideas related to change and its inevitability, and then last week, just learning to make decisions. I think all those are things that focus more on being a leader and how that will impact your team if those things aren't done properly. And, of course, our episode, as I mentioned, with how to be a bad leader. I mean that whole episode was like, if you're doing these things, you're negatively impacting their team.
Douglas Ford:And I think today's discussion really, as you said, is the culmination of those things that, if you're not doing these well, we kind of, I think, by default, talk a lot about maybe small teams, but these subjects we're talking about today is really bigger, broader picture concepts and the impacts that negative leadership, poor leadership, can have if it's allowed to be sustained for a long period of time, meaning bad leadership is sustained for a long period of time. I mean bad leadership is sustained for a long period of time. And so I look forward to this discussion today and where it's going to go and what we can learn about, what we need to look for in leaders as we're starting to grow ourselves and we still are looking for leaders, because there's people that are in charge of our cities, our states, our country, other companies, and we're looking for these leadership. What are some things that we can look for and what are some of the consequences if they're not good leaders?
John Ballinger:so that that brings the topic. The title of today's episode is the four pillars of society are failing due to lack of leadership. And let me go with those four pillars. Four pillars our, our faith, our family, businesses and government. And if you look back throughout history, those four pillars have routinely been what stood up a society. And so we talk about a lot.
John Ballinger:We talk a lot about those four pillars and the leadership in those four pillars, and what I started learning is is there a consistency between those four pillars and why they're all crumbling at the same time in our society? Because historically, there could have been one or two of the pillars that were fragile, that needed some propping up and some spackle on them or concrete and kind of smooth. But I can't see any other time in our country's foundation where all four pillars are actually crumbling at the same time like they are now, where all four pillars are actually crumbling at the same time like they are now. So I wanted to take all four pillars and do some data research on them to come to an understanding as, like what's the common thing? I call it root cause analysis and I think what the audience is going to hear today is there is a common theme to why they're all failing at the same time right now.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, and you and I last week were in a situation where we were looking at building and some things that happened to it and they were talking about the different pillars, the king pillar I think they called it actually the king post that was in there and how it had snapped and the pressure that must have been required to cause that to snap. And then on Sunday I heard about purpose of pillars, which is to hold things up. That's, their main purpose is to hold things up. And so we are talking about today those four pillars of our society through the lens that we look at it, and the state of their being. So, yes, it'd be an interesting conversation.
John Ballinger:Yeah, so the word for the week is resilience.
Douglas Ford:I think we're pretty excited about hearing about resilience.
John Ballinger:I do too, and I want I want the audience to really think about this word in context to what they're getting ready to hear. Here's the definition of resilience the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulty comma toughness. That's the first definition. Second is the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape elasticity. I get asked a lot are we too far gone to recover? And I can easily answer that question no, we are not too far gone. The challenge is is the longer that we go down this road, the tougher it takes to recover or bounce back the resiliency it's going to take? And are the people there that can be resilient in order to withstand and recover from the difficulty and to spring back into shape? That becomes the question.
John Ballinger:Each year. We continue to erode, it's going to take more to recover, and so, in this episode specifically, we're going to be talking about those four pillars and how they tie into one single common denominator that's causing the pillars to fail. So we're going to start with business leader issues and remember, we're talking about leadership and this article that I read a lot of articles, but this one particular was 2023, the article and it says while a great resignation may be over. It's just beginning for CEOs. According to research by Challenger gray and christmas, the firm found that more than 1500 ceos have left their posts so far in 2023, marking the highest number of departures since challenger began tracking the data in 2002 um, yeah, and I and I saw some uh short, wasn't quite as in depth, but a short article last week as well.
Douglas Ford:For the first quarter of 2024, 622 ceos have already left their position or given notice that they're leaving the position so think about what left.
John Ballinger:This is 2023. Its first quarters just kind of wrapped up. 600 more raise their hands that I'm out of here. Now I read some some very, very lengthy articles about why I mean between profits and supply chain. I mean there's a host of you know, if you're, if you're the boeing ceo, you're literally walking down the hall with your head hung down right Southwest, some of the debacles they've had. So I mean you can just keep going and going and going.
John Ballinger:But this, this article said there are four, at least four, reasons why we've seen an uptick in the CEO turnover the last few months. Those would be delayed CEO retirement, ceo burnout, concerns about CEO underperformance and, finally, high-performing CEOs who are taking this opportunity to level up a more attractive opportunity. So let's take this just a little bit at a time. So delayed CEO retirement Companies do not do a good job of preparing for succession planning. They really don't talk through with that executive level, not just the CEO, but let's say the C-suite and say, all right, what's your plans? What's 10 years? Look like and plan toward that, and then have somebody come in and train under them, tutor, mentor under them in preparation for the exit.
Douglas Ford:Horrible processes for that. Well, and I think you may I mean some of that may be attributed to and I know we don't want to go back there, but I mean COVID. I mean some of these CEOs may have been planning, you know, in late 2019, like, oh, I can see the end of the runway for me. And then you run into some of those issues and the ones who stuck around or the organizations got them to stick around. It's like maybe we're getting to a point where, well, I've stayed here long enough to kind of get us through that battle or through that storm, and now I'm ready to move on and do some other things. And so that's kind of get us through that battle or through that storm, and now I'm ready to move on and do some other things, and so um you know so that's kind of building up, but it it goes back to just the idea of like, like you said, they should have known right.
Douglas Ford:I mean they should have been some succession planning and preparing somebody else to step in and take those roles.
John Ballinger:Right. Second one, and I know a lot of that happened with the COVID and nobody understanding what was actually taking place, and but then CEO burnout takes place. You know, and, and now you're probably the reason they're retiring.
John Ballinger:Exactly. And then there's this big question from the boards and you're just not performing at the level we need to format. I report at one of the companies that I am working for right now to help an organization really start moving in the right direction, brought me in as a fractional C-suite that has a board, and you know what the board really understands Numbers, they know top-line sales, they know bottom-line profits, but they virtually have no concept of what happens in the middle of all that, the messy middle. I was thinking all that the messy middle, yeah, the messy middle, and because of that the CEO is always being, or the C-suite person is always being hammered quotation marks by the board about what's the problem. You know how much pressure did the Boeing CEO get from the board?
Douglas Ford:I would imagine a ton. Yeah, the stock prices went down. Now blackwind's got a black eye. I mean, this is a global organization that has basically just walked away from the responsibility in large part related to safety and care and concern for, for the ultimate customer, the end user, guess, who canceled a bunch of orders of Boeing aircraft, a bunch of airlines, like we don't want that liability.
John Ballinger:We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars and this is what we're getting. So think about that. And then there's always that high-, high performing CEO in the background. Just let me in there, just let me in there, I'll show them, I'll show them until they get in there. And they get in there and that first year they get eaten alive. I've seen it. I've seen them in the wings. I've got my MBA, I've got I mean, I'm ready to go. I've got all these things I'm going to do, I'm going to change the world. And they get in there and, man, they get eat a lot.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, you know, in the famous words of the philosopher Mike Tyson, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and it's changes the world, yeah, and then so I.
John Ballinger:so that's the big, that's big business. I went into the small business sector. So now what's going on down there? And here's some statistics. And this is this is painful for me because I love small business. I think I know it's the backbone of America, I know it's the engine that drives our economy, but 23.2% of private sector businesses fail within the first year. So think about a quarter of the businesses that go into business, they've left a job. They say we can do this, took a mortgage out on the house, took a retirement or whatever, and one in four, boom, they're gone within the first year. Man, that is tough. After five years, 48%. Think about what's gone on Douglas between year one and four, when you realize you're not going to make it the pain that you've gone through and at 50%, are going to fail. And then, after 10 years, 65.3 percent. I mean almost three quarters of the businesses within that 10-year mark are going to shut their doors and look at what that business owner's put his family through, the employees through. I mean it. That's. These are. Those are tough to read and understand this. This is what's going on.
John Ballinger:The first year business failure jumped more than two percentage points in last year's report. That report, which was compared to 2021 and 2020, found that 18.4% failed. So look it's gone. It continues to rise. Percent failed so look it's gone. It continues to rise. Trying to go into the um business climate after covet is tough. I mean this. That report just says how tough it absolutely.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, things, a lot of things have changed. Um, related to that. I mean just and we've talked about before finding talent, keeping talent, cheering talent, being a good leader, right.
John Ballinger:So then you roll out of that as a family, and I'm just going to read these are the top things that different organizations said the family is faced with today Adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, child abuse and neglect, homelessness, mental health problems, inadequate foster care services and inadequate adoption services, and the fact that a family of four needs over $100,000 annually just to survive in today's climate. And one in five dads are stay at home. Dad's now one in five, or stay at home Dad. The workforce right now is geared toward diversity and females. It's just what it is. I'm not getting political on you. It's just that's the way we find ourselves in society right now.
John Ballinger:And the dads are saying, well, my wife can get a better job making more money than I can.
John Ballinger:Yes, I'll stay because they care. Six $700 a week and that doesn't make any sense to go make a thousand dollars a week or $1,200 a week when I'm paying six or $700 for daycare, transportation and food and all that stuff. So, one in five. And they expect that to increase in the next three to five years with the amount of stay-at-home dads. So and that, and I kind of blew through that with the family, but the family is in a crisis too. So we've got businesses, small and large, in crisis leadership, we've got the family in a leadership crisis and look at all the things that families are faced with financial issues and society issues and now, after the break, we're going to go into what's going on in the churches in America and in government America and then we're going to round it out with all right, here's the common theme with all of us, so we'll come back after, firstly, you Today we are talking about some of the consequences that occur when leadership is not doing its part.
Douglas Ford:We focus quite often here at Firstly U about how we lead ourselves well. The last few episodes we've been talking about how you lead your team well or the impact that not leading yourself well can have on your team, and scope about some of the pillars of society that have been crumbling the last couple of decades at least, and maybe longer. But it's faith, family, business and government, and John talked to us about the family and business before we left. Now we're going to talk about the church and government, and we don't typically talk a lot about church, but the leadership fundamentals that we talk about on First Lead U really apply anyway, and certainly for the history of this country, church has been a pillar and a strength of this country, and we are facing some serious leadership issues in the church, just like we are in all other areas of society. So, john, why don't you kick off that conversation for us and let's see what your research is saying?
John Ballinger:Yeah and I want the audience to really hear what I'm saying as I start this portion of the government and the church that back when our country was being founded, a town wasn't really created until it had a school and a church. A school and a church were the foundational items that a town built itself around, and so if you think about it from that aspect and then think about where we're going to go today with poor church leadership and poor government leadership, you're going to see the theme that continues to surface and what needs to happen in order to turn the tides. But so I did some research and I want to read this, because this comes out of church leadership. Most people holding leadership positions in churches often don't have leadership skills. This issue is perhaps one of the most common leadership problems in churches.
Douglas Ford:I'd say that's very true.
John Ballinger:Now what I want to tell you is I want you to take that line and say most people holding leadership positions in businesses, most people holding leadership positions in families, and just replace that. Can't you get that same tenor in all those?
Douglas Ford:Absolutely. I mean, I think that what we, what we're seeing and we you talked about it early on with the CEOs it's like there seems to be less and less succession planning for any type of leadership, because it's moved more and more to all about me when can I go, what can I do, how can I take the next step? And less and less about developing a team, caring for a team, growing people so that they're ready to step into a leadership position. When you do get that because you've been a good leader and you are prepared and ready to take that next step in your leadership journey or that opportunity presents itself, so then you've left a trail of people who are ready to move into that, but that's becoming less and less these days.
John Ballinger:Yeah, so what they said is so, if most people do not have leadership skills, which causes problems in the church, what are the results? And it says the results are they find it challenging the people that are in those positions of leadership to make decisions, handle conflict and motivate people. Those issues alone often lead to division in the church and a lack of direction for the congregation.
Douglas Ford:Again, you could replace those with people in the business and the team, or I mean, you know, I mean, those statements are not untrue about any of these aspects we're talking about today.
John Ballinger:Now here's what the article said. With the lack of leadership development, training is lack of clear policies and procedures, and expectations aren't created for the organization, ineffective or nonexistent communication among staff, weak or nonexistent structure, poor delegation of tasks and proper onboarding of new team members and micromanagement. I'm telling you, take those boxes over to business or to government, and they're going to be the same thing.
Douglas Ford:Oh, absolutely, and didn't we talk about last week? Talk it costs approximately twenty five hundred dollars to onboard a new team member and, if so, if you're just running through team members, you know, yeah, that quickly adds up and, and just just for clarity, that's just the cost to bring them on.
John Ballinger:That is no training cost. So if you bring someone on and you try to take them through a 90-day probation period, that that cost escalates significantly because you've got the payroll, the person training them, and so you could be spending $20,000-plus on someone that's not going to make it because you have poor practices and onboarding team members.
Douglas Ford:Well, in a slightly different view of that. You know they talk about sales and getting customers. It's much easier to get a repeat sale from a current customer than it is to get a new customer to buy right. And it's the same thing with the team members, like if you've got a team member on board, it's much easier to do the things necessary to keep them and work with them and help develop them than it is to just go find a new team member or try to find a team member Right.
John Ballinger:Now those in leadership positions in the church, it says, feel lonely and isolated. They simply don't have any kind of support structure inside the church that will allow them to feel satisfied and to lead with confidence. Support structure inside the church that will allow them to feel satisfied and to lead with confidence. And many times the lack of good leadership can turn toxic. Without a team, a leader dries up Again. Take that, take the pastor word out of it and turn it into any of the business and the government. It's going to be the same thing, right? I hope the audience is seeing a pattern here. 50% of pastors feel unable to meet the demands of the job. 90% report working between 55 and 75 hours a week. Women clergy are more likely to experience burnout, with 65% reporting significant stress and 40% suffering symptoms of burnout. 90% of pastors are in some form of financial hardship. I don't.
Douglas Ford:When I read that one, I was like man 90%, which probably leads to their poor leadership right Like if they're stressed. If they're constantly trying to figure out how I'm going to take care of my family or contribute to my family, then that just compounds all the other problems.
John Ballinger:Obviously, we saved the best for last the government and not everyone's favorite topic and this article. Let me turn my page because this article I actually want to talk to this young lady that is head of this organization. Dr Maria Church is the CEO of Government Leadership Solutions. That lady and her organization must be covered up right now.
Douglas Ford:I made a note that was a brilliant idea.
John Ballinger:I made a note like we need to contact Dr Church because I want to talk to her. So excerpts of this are from a research that her organization did that when I started reading it again, it could go into any of the four pillars we're talking about. But it says over the past several decades, and increasingly in the post pandemic years, public trust in government has been declining. Our institutions face unprecedented challenges, such as public health crisis, wildfires, flooding and other severe weather events. In addition to navigating these complex issues, local governments also face ongoing socio-political problems relating to good governance, including funding issues, labor shortages and increasingly divided electorate. Good gracious, that's a mouthful. Then, when you start reading through here, there's Pew Research says that the trusting government has fallen 49 points since 1968 I'm surprised it took that long yeah, me too well, we don't know, it doesn't say what, necessarily was that in?
Douglas Ford:1968, but we'll assume it's.
John Ballinger:It was much higher than it is today, but it's like when they talk about how many americans have faith in the congress and they say whatever percentage of them. I'm like. Who are those people I don't like?
Douglas Ford:those people? Yeah, where's that 3% come?
John Ballinger:from. Those are some really optimistic people, but these figures reveal concerning reality, trusting government is plummeting, and it is no longer a distant concern but an issue that is preventing local government leaders from acting decisively around policymaking, budgeting and strategic planning, as I read that. And so a government is supposed to really do a few things for people it's supposed to protect local governments, provide services, but it's not. Like there's this huge chasm of stuff that government's supposed to do. It's really defined, but what we're seeing is a juggernaut of people raising their hands saying well, the government ought to do that, the government ought to do that, the government ought to do that. I think the government ought to do it this way.
John Ballinger:If you're in one of those elected positions, you feel like Gumby. You're getting pulled in nine different directions. You raised your hand and said I want to be elected to be a leader in that position. We really don't have a benchmark for leadership in government other than you got elected, so you've had to convince the populace why you should be a leader in that position. But now you're faced with all these things, with people this is my statement that probably are less than capable of being in a leadership position dealing with all these things.
Douglas Ford:Oh, absolutely, and we're not a political podcast. But, having lived in that world for a while, we've really created what's referred to as the political class, where, a lot of times not every time there's always exceptions and there's certainly a good number of people who are not going to fit this statement but a lot of times, once you get elected, your biggest concern is getting reelected. The hard choices and hard decisions that are necessary to really benefit the people you've been elected to represent. Because your concern is I want to get re-elected. Maybe because you think, well, I'm fighting for a greater good, a longer-term effort. But government, at least on the national level, was really never intended to be a lifelong pursuit. It was meant to go, serve some time and come back, live out your life.
John Ballinger:Yeah, so they did these surveys in local government leaders and the survey said that 58% of respondents placed a lack of trust at the top of their list of challenges. 43% identified evolving public perception and trust as an issue. Overall, trust as a challenge was placed higher than funding and budgeting issues. Think about that and we know what kind of funding and budgeting issues we've got in America right now, because we're constantly we're going to have to raise taxes here. We're going to have to raise taxes here, and I've often thought root cause analysis if we are not spending our money appropriately, do we have the right people in place to ensure that we're having our money spent appropriately? Well, this survey says here's a problem, and it's more than 10 points higher than any other problem that they see going on in government right now. It's lack of trust and leadership.
John Ballinger:This organization attempts to go into organizations that are government so state, local, federal government and teach them. Here's what you need to do to inspire leadership in the government to deal with what's going on, and I've got a highlight here that says that local governments have approximately $2 trillion taxpayer dollars each year to create public trust and stewardship in their organizations. So that's the workforce, public sector and $2 trillion, and anybody that's been on, that's listened to the podcast, knows that. I've said this before if you counted to $1 trillion, it would take you 32,000 years. If you counted 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days, and think every year you've got trillions of dollars that the people are given to the government in order to hopefully create a foundation of legitimate operations for us as a citizenry.
Douglas Ford:And you said those were the local governments, which is where you see the most impact from your tax dollar.
John Ballinger:really, yeah, and as I start reading down through here part of this research says that only 15% of Americans identify themselves as informed on public policy.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, that's what you do. I mean, how do you even know if you're being properly informed? I mean, I think that's. I mean you would go back to the trust issue that you just talked about a few minutes ago as being the number one concern among people. Like, maybe you're trying, but you may label yourself as uninformed because you don't even know if the information you're getting is the right information Right.
John Ballinger:Yeah, you heard that pause in there because both of us are looking at each other, looking at this, thinking I mean we're literally scratching our heads. And part of that scratching of our heads is because we know when we've taken in our process of first lead you into organizations. We had a meeting with a young lady today that has made great strides in leadership. I mean great strides in leadership in an organization, large organization, and done it in a year or less, wouldn't you say.
Douglas Ford:Oh yeah, I would say yeah, absolutely Selected.
John Ballinger:Right, we took her through a selection process.
Douglas Ford:Not a hiring process.
John Ballinger:Not a hiring process, a selection process. Spent time with her Three meetings, fourth meeting internally with the company, and said yes, this is the one, and look at the difference that process made in the company. And she sits here today, a year later after being selected, and tells us some of the best information that's needed in order to move the company forward through some of the difficult waters the company finds itself in in today's business climate. So we know it works. That's just one example, but we can give multiple examples on selection process and developing yourself as a leader and what it does to the team and how it does affect the messy middle, because that's what it really does a lot to affect the messy middle.
John Ballinger:I want to read this because this is something that I don't know if we need to put this out on the website, but this is something that really the audience needs to hear. Take it off, write it down, put it on your desk, hang it on your wall in your office. Rebuilding trust is not an aspiration, it is a necessity. I had to stop and pause at that one because I always thought I've I've aspired to help people rebuild trust and grow and I'm like, oh, my goodness, it kind of smacked me. It's not an aspiration, it's a necessity right now, with the shape we're in, and it says for the necessary wellbeing of our communities and the preservation of our democratic values.
Douglas Ford:Oh, that's wrong.
John Ballinger:That is strong. I mean, like I got it highlighted, I've got green next to it, like that needs to boom, cause that's really what we want. It firstly do we want to be able to impact leadership and rebuild trust, and now I mean I had to change my frame of leadership and rebuild trust. And now I mean I had to change my frame of reference and say, you know what? This isn't something that we should aspire to. This isn't something companies should aspire to bring us in to do. No, this is a necessity. Now, if you're going to survive, then we're going to survive. And lastly and this statistic that I'm going to tell you next kind of speaks to something we talked about earlier, but it pains me to say this, it really pains me to say this 98% of all incumbents were reelected to congressional seats in 2023.
Douglas Ford:And I would probably say a good number of them. Maybe we won't go to a majority, but a good number of them probably ran unopposed.
John Ballinger:Well, it says that because very few seats are competitive. But here's my point to bringing this statistic up on the government side. If we as a populace are not engaged in being informed and understanding who we're sending up to represent us and we're getting this I word soup sandwich that we keep getting handed to us then we need to step back and change and become more informed and think about who's representing us as a populace, because it's not working. It's the same for businesses. If the person in a leadership position is not impacting the organization and is not casting vision and is not creating succession planning and is not doing the things necessary to deal with today's issues that are facing society, then put somebody else in there. There are people there, I can promise you. There are people in society that have given the opportunity to go in those positions and let them do what they're capable of doing. They can do it.
John Ballinger:The problem is that we have incompetent people in positions of leadership and they are jockeying to keep people out of that position because those it's a free ride for them. They can continue to screw up and screw up people and their lives and families and economies and all that stuff, and we'll just keep voting them back in, or we'll just keep letting them run the company, or, in big business, we'll just give them a bunch of money and let them go live the high life somewhere and try it again with somebody else. So, rounding this out, the common theme of all four of those pillars is failed leadership, which is why we named the title of the podcast that we did, and I hate having this negative podcast talking about the challenges that we face, but I don't hate it so much that I won't talk about it because it is a necessity now. It's not an aspiration, it is a necessity now.
Douglas Ford:It's not an aspiration, yeah, and I think. Well, I think today's topic was a good to just as a reflective podcast on where we are, what we're doing in it, and again it kind of talks about the culmination of what we've been talking about the last few weeks, which is, if you don't do things to help lead yourself and to lead your team, well, these are going to be the results, and we have this playing out in front of us every day. And so I think the challenge and perhaps the homework for this week is, if you are a leader in an organization, or you are aspiring to be a leader in an organization and or you're just looking to lead yourself better, take some honest assessments of the decisions you're making, the actions you're taking. How are those impacting you and your team, and what steps, if any, need to be taken to make sure those are positive impacts and moving everyone in a growth direction.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and those are tough, when you have to self-assess yourself and possibly say to yourself I'm not as good as what I thought I was and I need to have some improvements and develop something. But if you don't look at what we're getting as a society and I will say this, and I've said it probably in one of our other podcasts we're better than what we're delivering right now to the next generation. And shame on us if we let pride get in the way of developing ourselves so that our next generation has a fighting chance.
Douglas Ford:And we've offered this before too, too. If you would like some opportunity to address some of these issues, we have a self-assessment on our website. You can take those. If you take that and you email us, we'd love to spend a little bit of time unpacking that with you. We can offer that up as a free opportunity to spend a few minutes just talking through that and giving some pointers and developing your own personal plan to self-improvement.
John Ballinger:Yep, yep, mr Ford, we no longer aspire to do this, but firstly, do you. We realize now it's a necessity. It is a necessity. So, uh, thank you very much for participating audience and we look forward to, uh, next week's episode. Yes, have a great week. We'll see you next time you.