Today we’re going to be interviewing David Veech. David teaches leaders how to love, learn, and let go so they can create a workplace that fully engages the creative and productive powers of their people. He learned through 20 years of service in the army and is still learning after 20 years of being in the consulting and training space. His messages will hopefully inspire you and your teams to obliterate obstacles, accelerate innovation, and evaluate performance, leaving everyone motivated and engaged for the future. We’re very excited to have him here. Before we do though, I want to ask you, please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much any podcatcher of your choice. You can also subscribe at peopleprocesses.com which will give you exclusive subscriber-only content, including a quick summary and checklist after this interview of some of the key highlights. 

David, thank you so much for coming on, Sir. Welcome to the show.

This is very exciting.

Well. So, David, tell me, you are, I mean, you’ve had a heck of a journey. You’re not one of them, fresh off the boat, 22-year-olds fresh out of the college, set up a company. You’ve done this quite a while.

I’ve tried. Yeah.

So, 40 years ago, you started in the army. Is that about where your leadership journey began?

I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, though, was commissioned when I was 20 years old, into the infantry and I went to a combat unit but I managed to make it 20 years in the Army without ever getting shot at.

Outstanding. And so after you got out of the army, you wound up setting up a consultancy organization, is that right?

Well, yeah. My last job in the army was teaching. I was teaching at the Defense Acquisition University Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And that’s where they have all the production quality and manufacturing specialists that go through a particular training program. And I was assigned to bring a lean curriculum into that program. And so I taught there for a few years and because I didn’t know a whole lot about lean, I went out and found the experts at the University of Kentucky, and went through their programs so that I could kind of steal that content and build it into the content I was creating for the Defense Acquisition University. And I created a relationship with the UK and they liked me enough to hire me when about six months before I retired from the army. They hired me and I started teaching, continuing education courses for them. It was pretty cool.

Now, I don’t think many people who at least haven’t been in the army don’t think of the army as a, I don’t know, has a manufacturing arm or has I mean, of course, they buy things, I guess. But what is it you would teach, I mean, engineering and money, maintenance, that kind of thing to your army soldiers?

Well, we have a government office in virtually every defense contractor facility. So when I was stationed at the Lockheed Martin Vought Systems Plant in Grand Prairie, Texas for three years, I was the operations manager, and we did government oversight of the production schedule of the quality of the products to make sure that all the bookkeeping was squared away. So there are just all of the business specialties that are required in government oversight to make sure that we’re getting our money’s worth out of the defense programs.

Absolutely. 

So we teach those people the things that they need to know to manage the quality production and management of the system. One of the things that I wanted to especially do there in that last job, was 1998-1999. And a lot of defense contractors were trying to apply these Lean principles that Toyota made famous. And I got to see them do that. And I got to see a bunch of government folks shut him down because it was different from what they understood the processes were supposed to be like. And so my goal was to teach all of those government folks to not block that but to encourage it and steer it so that both the contractor and the government could benefit. 

Interesting. Well, so after doing that you went on to become a college professor. How did that wind up? What was your journey from there to consultancy and international consultancy around these topics all over the world?

Yeah. Well, I found out early that I love to teach. And so it was great. I asked specifically to be assigned to Wright Patterson to teach. They sent me off to an Air Force academic instructor course, that tested what I thought I knew about teaching. And as a profession, it’s been one of the priorities that I’ve assigned to my development, is how can I be a better teacher? And of course, that informed everything else that I did. So I was doing pretty well when the University of Kentucky asked me to come and teach. We taught there. I taught graduate programs, and I taught Continuing Education at the University of Kentucky. But then my partners and I decided we wanted to kind of have a broader impact. And so we created a consulting firm and built a practice in Australia and the US, and I made 27 trips to Australia in six years. So keep me in frequent flyer miles. And we have a pretty good impact there. But it was always fun for me, it was fun. But we got into consulting around 2008-2009. And we were much more focused on keeping companies from going bankrupt. Instead of creating the kind of cultures that I know, lean systems can help organizations build and creating the kind of leaders that drive that kind of change. And so I wanted to go back into an academic environment to do a little bit more research, and to grow a little bit more and then to teach more specifically teach younger people how to think a little bit differently. And so I was asked to come to the Ohio State University and teach in the Master of Business Operational Excellence Program. And I did that, I joined the faculty in 2013. I taught undergraduate classes and graduate classes. But then I got this bug that I got to keep moving. I needed to travel more. And I had some old clients that called me back and said, “Hey, we want you to come and do this.” And so I had to kind of renegotiate the deal with the Ohio State. And I only taught part-time there. And now I’m just I’m teaching just a tiny bit at Ohio State, and doing much more work with direct hands-on clients.

Interesting. And so when a client hires you out, they’re looking for lean training, lean operations training, is that primarily where they’re looking?

About half of them want some type of lean help. Right. I’ve got a client that is focused on enhancing their visual management systems and building their teams a little bit more effectively and teaching more problem-solving skills more directly, but the other half want leadership development. They want me to coach their team leaders coach their executives, and try to help them be more effective leaders. 

Interesting. Okay. So now you’ve traveled the world. You’re salt by Universities for teaching, you have outstanding clients, but I’m sure in the 20-year journey you’ve had between academia and entrepreneurship, you’ve had some pretty rough bumps as well. The most recurring email I get is that people love that I asked this coming question. It’s somewhat uncomfortable for my interviewees. So I apologize for upfront. And I guess I’d say, if you’ve listened to a prior interview, you know what’s coming. And that is, I’d like you to tell me about your worst entrepreneurial moment, the story around it, how you got there, what happened, what the results were. And this is so that our listeners can one relate and realize that even people like you got such a stellar career and are now in the catbird seat, have had some pretty low lows. But also, so they can learn from our mistakes rather than having to repeat them themselves. So David, tell me that story.

There’s a lot to choose from.

Right? That’s what I want to talk to entrepreneurs. They’re like, “Well, gosh, I can’t think of any of that bad.” I’m like, “Okay, let me just end the interview. You haven’t been doing this long enough. You should have a long list, my friend.”

Well, I’ve got a couple that comes to mind right away. And both of them involve me teaching new people and making the assumption that they didn’t know as much as I thought they knew. And so…

Overestimate, didn’t know as much as you thought so.

Yeah. The guys I teach in the corporate world are typically very experienced, very knowledgeable. And along with that comes some pretty good ego. And of course, I bring my ego into every situation as well. But the thing is when I tried it teach something that I just absolutely know and it’s wrong. And the students tell me, it’s wrong, then that kind of pierces your brain and says like, “How did you screw this up?” And so it forces me to be much more deliberate in my preparations and much more deliberate in understanding the audience that I’m addressing, and what are their real needs so that I can deliver the appropriate value. And the cool thing is, this is something I learned very early in the army is that I don’t know everything and there’s a whole lot of stuff I need help with. And I am not afraid to ask for help. So in a lot of the programs that we have delivered over the years, there are different perspectives and different ways to implement a lot of these tools and principles. And if you only teach one way, then that gets you in trouble because other people have made things successful with a bunch of different processes. And so if you go in and you ask them to share the way that they’ve done that, and many of them have had fantastic results, and they will share immediately the way that they’ve applied that even if it is 180 degrees from the way I was going in. And so it’s been good having those kinds of audiences to kind of keep you humble, and keep you hungry, and keep you learning and keep you developing. So I relish those experiences, even though they are incredibly uncomfortable when you’re going through it.

Sure. Well, I’m just being brought in as a consultant or a trainer too. You’re going to experience pushback, but your attitude is that oftentimes the people you’re working with may know some portion at least better than you?

Well, I think a lot of us especially leaders who identify themselves as servant leaders, think we shared this tendency toward the imposter syndrome, right? I’ve been doing this for a long time. Yeah, I’m pretty good at it. But there’s an awful lot of stuff I still don’t know, I still hesitate to call myself an expert in anything, although lots of other people do. And you get this feeling when you’re with particular audiences like if these guys find out that, who I am, it’s horrible. But fortunately, those are the things that can keep you pushing, to prepare, and to be more effective. And if you don’t have those kinds of things that challenge you, then I think life gets boring very quickly.

Absolutely. My expertise where I spend my time is in this world of HR People Processes as we call them. And we’ve been doing that for many years. I have an MBA focused on that, I research that, published on that. And I got an opportunity about three years ago to speak to an audience of a couple of hundred CPAs and or accountants and bookkeepers and CPAs. And I had done some public speaking, very minor, like a small group of companies or the Better Business Bureau, that kind of thing. 

Yeah. 

But I’ve never really like flown somewhere to give a talk. I’d grown organically and through marketing, and I just hadn’t ever done that. And I was absolutely terrified. Not so much of the public speaking but of the audience, because I’m thinking, “Gosh, I’m going in front of a bunch of CPAs, a bunch of bookkeepers, accountants and I’m going to be talking about these structures and business processes.” And these guys are experts and certified deep down, they’re gonna know that I don’t know the ins and outs of the tax world, as well as I, should when it comes to these things. And it did stress me, I did a lot of studying for it, I did a lot of prep, it went very, very well. And now accountants are our number one referral source. And that first group that I spoke to, even though I’ve had 20 or 30 keynotes since then, is still probably the tightest, highest participating public speaking group I’ve ever been to. So there’s something about that deep down feeling of, “Oh, I’m going to get caught that impostor syndrome,” I think that can make you anyway, perform at an incredibly high level.

I agree 100%. We gotta have something that challenges our skill level. 

Yeah. 

Well, we don’t grow.

Exactly. So, all right, David. Well, that was a good lesson, a good story. Now, you are out there and you are consulting with other companies. And they are bringing you in partially for leadership partially for lean training. Our listeners vary, their 5 man shops to 5000 man shops and even 125,000 man companies. And I guess what I would say is if you had an hour that you could spend at random with one of those people, what would be your first steps to try and they said, “Look, I want an hour of David’s time.” What are we going to do that David could come in and help us figure out? Like, how would you identify a problem, a need, basic steps that every business should be doing this? If you’re not doing it, this is where we should start. What would you kind of start in your diagnostics?

Everything begins with the relationship for me. I really need to understand what it is that they do and what it is that they want to do? What do they want to get out of our engagement? I don’t typically go in with, here’s my assessment, we’ll just check all these blocks and we’ll get you this score. And then I promise after a year you do all this stuff, we’ll move that needle. I really am much more focused on their process of engaging employees and developing leaders, whether they’re lean, or whether their leadership clients, everything comes down to engaging their employees and developing their leaders. And the key to the research that I’ve done, the key to a truly excellent organization is this foundation of what I call dynamic stability. Right? So it’s a concept that I’ve been playing with and trying to refine and understand. But what we have to have in organizations is enough stability so that processes are repeatable enough so that people working in those processes, improve their skills in those processes. Whether that’s a thinking process like problem-solving, or whether that’s a manufacturing process, or whether that’s a human resources process. We’ve got to be able to understand the impact that we’re having on those, we got to understand the standard and expectation that our customers and our leaders have of our performance. And we’ve got to be able to see very quickly when there are any deviations, which would be a problem. 

So we spent a lot of time talking about how they measure things. We spent a lot of time talking about how leaders present themselves in the workplace. We spent a lot of time in lean talking about Gemba walks, where leaders go to the Gemba which is the real place. The place where the action is placed with value is created, and how much time leaders can spend in the Gemba. And what I’ve learned everywhere is that the leaders just don’t spend enough time in the Gemba. And there are a few purposes for these Gemba walks. Tom Peters calls it management by walking around. But he is much more generalized about his management by walking around than we are about Gemba walks. Because we want to do a Gemba walk so we know that the system we designed is actually functioning properly. So we go and see, we go and see and when we’re out there going and seeing, we are asking questions of people, not micromanaging, not directing, not solving problems. We’re asking questions, and we’re showing respect. So if I can get leaders to get out of their offices, and out in the Gemba more so that they can interact with people, build better relationships and see where they need to direct resources the organization to provide the support that people need, then I think they’re doing good. Nobody goes out enough. That’s my number one criticism of every leader, you just got to get out more. 90% of your time should be out spending time with the people who are working in your organization. And when you look at the flight schedules of most CEOs, they’re gone so much.

Right. 

And yeah, they’ve got lots and lots of varied responsibilities. But the people in the organization need you for them to be more effective, and if they’re more effective, that’s probably going to have a bigger impact on the performance of the company and therefore the performance of the stock price. Then lots of other things that these guys are trying to do. So focus on your folks, focus on the need of your folks. And I’ve kind of boiled it down to four needs if we can just remember four things, right? First is a challenge, so we got to set appropriate goals for people. And to me, the challenge is always a positive thing. It’s not a dare, it’s not a pushback. It’s, “Hey, can you do it this much faster? Can you do it this much farther? Can you do it this much better.” And it’s just got to surpass their current skill level, right? And if you put them together with a team of people, that they can learn from each other, and they can practice and they can try new things as they try to develop this routine so that they can achieve this challenge, then that is like the perfect learning organization. So challenge, and then provide the right kind of support and part of the right kind of support as the team, correct their improper performance. So we’ve got to get much better as leaders at saying, “Stop. That wasn’t done right. Can you see where you deviated from the expectation? Can you see what the difference is? Can you see how we’ve got a problem here? And then can you see what’s causing that and what might we do about that?” Rather than just slapping on the head and say, “Hey, you screwed that up. Don’t do it again.” There’s usually a process problem associated with every human failure.

Yeah, you got to go back to the root cause it’s not just, I had a bad day.

Yeah. But most of those conversations that involve correcting someone else’s behavior can be pretty demoralizing. And so the final thing that you’ve got to be able to do is you got to be able to encourage people. Now, I don’t know about you, Rhamy. But, has anybody ever spent 20 minutes teaching you how to encourage somebody else?

You know, that’s very true. I’ve never had formal encouragement training.

So we’re just supposed to know these kinds of things.

Right.

So if we can articulate the steps you take and going through these different things that we need leaders to do, then there’ll be much better equipped to actually do that.

So to recap that you said, challenge, support, correct, and encourage.

Yeah, and I think those roll into all four of the other key decisions that leaders have to make every day. And that’s you mentioned them in the intro a little bit. Love, learn, let go, and connect. If leaders will make that decision every day, “Today, I’m going to love my folks.” And that doesn’t mean we’re going to go out. we’re going to have group hugs and we’re going to cry together and all that smushy stuff. It’s not an emotional kind of thing. Okay. Love is a very, very tangible decision that leaders have to make. And the result of that decision is simply the leader placing the needs of her people above her own. And the next piece is the learn piece going to place the needs of somebody else above my own.

The most important thing for me to learn is what they need, right? So I have to go out and interact with them to understand what they really need, and then reach into my bag of resources, and try to provide the support that they need to actually succeed. So, love then learn. And then one of the best ways to develop people’s skills is to actually let go and let them do the things that you know they need to do. The problem we run into is that we’re always under time pressure now, and in most organizations, leaders have gotten their jobs now because they’re good at certain things, right? So they’re the best employee we had at XYZ. And so we’re gonna make them the boss, we’re gonna make them the team leader, we’re going to make them the supervisor, and they might not have any human skills at all. They might just be a fantastic worker. So we’ve got to be able to identify those guys and help them become more effective leaders. But the key thing we have to have leaders start focusing on is when somebody tries something and they mess it up, rather than just taking it back and say, “Well, I gave you that chance. Now I know that I can do it right. And I can do it quickly. So I’m just going to do it.” As soon as leaders do that, and they start doing the tasks that their folks ought to be doing, they give up leadership, they’re not leading anymore. They’re just doing work. And so we’ve got to be able to create the time to allow those people to build their skills, up to the point where the leader is confident in their abilities, and they are confident themselves in their abilities because you get fantastic outcomes when people are confident at work.

Absolutely. And so in that process that you were laying out the challenge, support, correct, encourage. There’s this idea, I forgot who talked to you but you mentioned kind of you have to have one-foot instability to the extent that you can repeat processes in and improve them and have your people skill up in them. And you need one foot out into chaos, into this world where things are changing, and they’re learning and they’re getting a new thing.

That’s the dynamic part, right? Yeah. 

Right, the dynamic.

Like I should so.

So when are you as a leader or as a manager, if you’re, let’s say, you have a task that’s currently on your desk, that’s something you’ve done. You’ve got it down, but it’s kind of booger and you now know it’s time to get it off your desk and have a subordinate step up into that position. Your kind of four-step process there has challenged, support, correct, and encourage, let’s assume the challenges do the task that you weren’t doing before. What sort of items would you recommend, you kind of briefly mentioned a team? But in terms of support, how do you tell when or an employee? Because obviously, there’s like pure resources, I need you to build this wall. Here are the bricks and mortar, but outside of the physical items to do it. What sort of support do you mean in that?

Well, for every challenge to prevent the leader from just abandoning the team, what we want to be able to do is we want to create a process that will essentially guarantee that the person or the team will succeed in the challenge. So the support means we’re going to give you time to build that process and find the best way to achieve that challenge. And then we’re going to teach everybody how to do that. And how are we going to measure that so that I can know when I’m doing my Gemba walk around the office, around the factory or around the parade ground, whatever it might be. How will I be able to know very quickly if you need help? Not for me to step in and take it from you, but for me to ask, ask key questions, help you think through, and then challenge you to take the next step, I challenge you to make that next decision in that. So it’s a very personal, very high touch kind of relationship that we’ve got to have as we’re developing people. It’s not something as, “Hey, go take these three online courses, and then you should be good to go. Right?

I think it’s interesting when you said support, you need a process that’s going to nearly guarantee success for that person. But then your next sentence, it was really interesting. You were like, and you need to give them time to develop that process. So in my head, when you’re saying, alright, support that means, tell them what to do, to the extent that they can’t screw it up. But really, what you mean by that is give them the time and resources and research capabilities as a way to think of it to come up with a process internally that they are going to execute, which will guarantee success. And as part of that process tell you, how it is that you are going to know that it worked and know when to intervene. 

Exactly.

So the support is less telling them what to do and more giving them the room to figure out what to do, along with the processes that require, they document it and report on it. 

And you stay engaged, the leader has to stay engaged to continue providing the right kind of resources and support, but the leader doesn’t step in and tell them what to do.

Very interesting. I mean, there’s an interview we had not too long ago with a management trainer and he said he had a couple of rules for management, but the one that stuck in my head was a two-parter. He said a manager is never allowed to walk by trash. If there’s trash, it’s got to be taken care of. It’s got to be cleaned up. 

Yep. 

But Rule #2 is a manager is not allowed to pick up the trash. And everybody likes rule number one. And rule number two is the reason that managers are hard to find. 

Yeah. 

And I thought that’s ever since he said that it’s really stuck in my head. But I think that this kind of goes to that second tier, which does not only do you need to identify the problem or layout the challenge you need to give with a runway for them to then design their way of fixing it to take on the challenge.

Absolutely. They need to be willing to accept those challenges. And a truly engaged workforce that is highly confident they will bring challenges to you as the leader. 

Oh, absolutely. 

Because they will see ways to improve processes that you will never dream of and if they’re measured properly and supported properly and encouraged and corrected properly, they’ll be able to set challenges that you’ll never imagine. And that’s really our main goal to get that engaged culture.

Let’s say that someone’s listening right now and they go, Hey, David, we have plenty of challenges.

Oh, yeah.

I feel like we have a good support structure. Our team normally does a good job. They seem happy. We have high morale. But I’m to a degree a pushover, when my staff screws up, I say, “Gosh, Jeff, that sucks man.” Well, let’s get it fixed and no consequence happens. And sometimes I feel like my people aren’t getting the correction. They need to know the severity of the issues that they call. Do you have any goodbyes on how to properly correct without taking over or utterly demoralizing? I mean, obviously, people aren’t going to like being corrected, but without going too far?

Well, I think the most important part of that whole thing is to articulate the expectation. Okay, how clearly have you really stated what is supposed to happen? And how are you measuring that? Right? Because we put a lot of measurements