The Rooftop Podcast

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting down with one of my coaching students, and we were talking about what's going on. One of the things he was sharing with me was, you know, “my people just keep dumping their crap on me. Not only are they dumping their crap on me, but it's all this in-fighting and bickering. One group will come in or one leader will come in and share with me what's going on here a...

Do you ever have a challenge getting your prospects to lean in and listen to what you're saying? To get them to focus and pay attention on the products or services that you're putting out there? Well, you're not alone. Lots of folks deal with this, and lots of folks wrestle with this, especially in the trust-depleted, disengaged, distracted arena that we operate in today.

I saw it all the time as...

What's happening today with trust in our business? What's happening today with trust in our community, in our schools where our kids go? It seems that everywhere you look, trust is going down. In all the years I spent as a Green Beret working in trust depleted villages around the world, this was something we had to contend with all the time. We had to find ways to read trust in a room, overcome tr...

How to Wear Your Power: When Trust is Low and Risk is High You know, Stuart Diamond, one of my mentors in negotiation says, "Leaders should wear their power lightly." Teddy Roosevelt said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." I think all of those are relevant. Right? I say red lines. Wear your power lightly, be self-deprecating, but always have your red lines established and d...

I love sitting around the fire pit and talking with you about leadership skills and leadership actions that I learned in the trust depleted places around the world, that work even better in your world. Sharing the skills of leadership, Rooftop Leadership, from life and death so that you can use them in life and business. Let’s take a moment to talk about the “soft skills”. I call them the “Lawrenc...

Understanding the power of hospitality both as a giver and a receiver is a powerful skill. Hospitality has tremendous business impacts for you in the modern era, especially when you think about how trust depleted, how distracted, how disengaged the world is. When someone demonstrates hospitality, it's a powerful thing. I would go to places in Afghanistan that were so trust depleted, so violent, ye...

If the only tool in your kit bag is a hammer, then every problem you face in life is going to be a nail. We live in what I call the triple “P” environment. “Pissed off, Put upon, Pisces”. Two thirds of Americans don't trust their neighbor and it's climbing. We don't trust banks, politicians, media or law enforcement like we used to, our institutions that were once the vanguards of leadership and t...

Building rapport and understanding reciprocity is essential for leaders today. I don't care if you're the president of a commercial bank, I don't care if you're the founder of a nonprofit or if you work in sales, right? Your understanding of reciprocity is essential and the reason is because humans are meaning seeking creatures. We are emotional creatures and we are certainly social creatures. You...

Always put “Relationships Before Transactions”. If you want to get “surrounded on purpose”, if you want to apply the “Lawrencian” skillset, if you want to establish rapport with a prospect and turn them into a client, if you want to keep a client for the long term so that loyalty is in place and transactions just spin off that relationship, if you want to keep your clients when the market tanks an...

Have you ever heard of a guy named Lawrence of Arabia? What I am interested in and I think will serve you is the skill set that he used to build rapport, to establish relationships, and ultimately loyalty with very disparate, distrustful, difficult to work with folks. And then mobilize them, and galvanize them into a fighting force. What Lawrence did simplistically, was that he created a vision, h...

What does it take to establish rapport? Building Rapport is a critical skill for all business leaders, all entrepreneurs, anyone who has to deal with people. We are always faced with situations where we have to establish rapport. Rapport is that initial connection that is a harmonious relationship where two parties understand each other and connect. And if you don't have that rapport, because huma...

On this episode of Rooftop Rally Point, we're talking about another principle of the Special Forces approach that you can use in life and business which is getting, “Surrounded on Purpose”. How do we get Surrounded on Purpose? Well, what I teach on this, and I still teach this to special ops and law enforcement is, one, let's get a really clear understanding of what the goals are. What are our goa...

"Look sir, I think, right in this area here we're doing too much show and tell and we're not working ourselves out of a job." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And my old and wise Team Sergeant started to explain to me that, the most important thing that we could do on this deployment was not demonstrate our prowess or our capability, or to provide a short-term skillset, but...

As Green Berets building solid teams, we knew that the next best thing to shared struggle is shared experience. As humans, remember, we're the most social creatures on the planet, so we're always keeping tabs at a semi-conscious level of who we can group with, who we can work with, who we can stand shoulder to shoulder with, and obviously the people that we have shared experiences with are the one...

Many leaders believe that "soft" skills, like active listening, narrative competence, interpersonal presence, they think that those skills, because they're called "soft skills", are secondary to the "hard skills", or that they convey a form of weakness that a leader really doesn't need, right? They believe you need the "hard" skills if you're going to be a l...

It was a big lesson for me as a leader to see that in high stakes, no fail situations, the initial reports that often come in are wrong or at least inaccurate, or at least not fully baked. And that's just human nature. We all go through this. If we are exposed to a crisis situation or a high stress situation or a situation where there's just a lot of stress, we likely won't get all the facts right...

I made lots of mistakes as an army officer in Special Forces. Lots of things I could have done better, but one of the things I did learn was never to quit. Because of the training that you go through in Special Forces and all the training leading up to Special Forces, if you quit you won't make it. It's just that simple, but I believe that's true in life as well. Join me by the fire pit as we disc...

As a rooftop leader, there's going to be times when you have to do things that are not pleasant. You're going to have to do things with your coworkers that involve you standing up for things. With your associates and your employees where you have to hold the line on standards. Or with your boss where you have to push back on behalf of your people, or what you know to be right. Again, people don't...

As I look at my life, six years after retirement from the military, after 23 years, I am coming to see more and more that leadership is forever, that is, real leadership. Rooftop leadership is forever and that's why I chose this title for the third video in our little series right now on, “Rooftop Rally Point”, of five lessons I learned in combat, that I believe you can apply in your life Join me...

The opposite of fear, is love. The greatest counter poised to fear the ancients believed is love, the love of the individual warrior for his brothers in arms. At Thermopylae, on the final morning when the last surviving Spartans knew they were all going to die, they turned to one of their leaders and asked him what thoughts they should hold in their minds in this final hour to keep their courage s...

The thing that I learned that I want to talk about today as we go into Memorial Day is that “Every Breath is Precious”. Every breath we take in, every breath we let out is precious because our time on this earth is limited and we don't know how much time we have. And I will tell you this, Sergeant Major Willy Lubbers knew that. I wanted to highlight Willy as a part of our Memorial Day discussion,...

A movement is where people take action, in a collective way, that they otherwise wouldn't take in the face of high stakes, high risk, ambiguity and complexity. Yet they take a stand, shoulder to shoulder, and achieve a tipping point that sways the scales, tips the balance in a way that is representative of historical change. And whether you're doing this with a product, whether you're doing this w...

Humans will not take action unless they feel psychologically safe, and unless they feel connected to the other humans around them. Humans will not take action of any kind, they won't buy from you, they won't invest in you, they won't believe in you, they won't follow you, unless they feel safe and unless they feel connected. Meeting people where they are, not where you want them to be, is one of t...

The “Mission Decision Line”, or the “MDL”, is the point of no return. It's a line on the ground, and on your map, it's like a valley, or a linear feature like a road, it's easily recognizable and it tells everybody from the highest headquarters to the operators and the pilots, that once you cross it, there's no turning back. That is the decision line that no matter what happens, unless you hit ext...

If you want to move people to action it's those soft skills of storytelling, physicality, interpersonal connection, reciprocity, active listening, and negotiating that are the most effective, and you must practice those skillsets. The two ways that I say to do it are the same methods that the Green Berets employed before going into Sanh Te. They used the skillsets of Practice and Preparation. Join...