( 0m0s ] John Frey: Let's be clear when most teams fail, often the number one reason is a human related failure, not a process related failure or something else. And it's because we didn't do the hard work at the beginning that facilitates better business outcomes.
[ 0m15s ] Jeff Ma: Hello and welcome to Love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business. We want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from. We believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I am your host, Jeff Ma, and as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories with real people about real business and really real life. And my guest today is Dr. John Fry, develop, and he develops and he leads HPE's practice for customer collaboration on sustainability and IT efficiency.
[ 0m58s ] Jeff Ma: John partners with HPE's largest customers, stakeholders and governments to develop low- carbon solutions to business challenges, share best practices and drive new business opportunities. And John frequently shares his knowledge with media all around the world, including in a documentary called Cloud 2, does cloud cost the Earth? And prior to HPE, HPE and Compact, he worked for Boeing, NASA and Arco Alaska.
[ 1m17s ] Jeff Ma: John developed his leadership skills both from earned degrees in engineering, divinity and leadership, and as well as being a leader and uh through leading volunteer emergency response teams for municipalities, government and academic institutions. He's an ordained pastor serving congregations for over 20 years and's both a minister and musician and he is my honored guest today here on this episode as we dive into servant leadership a little bit.
[ 1m44s ] Jeff Ma: So with that, John, how are you today? How are you doing?
[ 1m54s ] John Frey: I'm doing great. The sun is shining and uh it's a beautiful day out and a great day to talk about leadership as well.
[ 2m2s ] Jeff Ma: Every day is a great day to talk about leadership in my world, so absolutely. Uh, John, I I start with a question that never gets old for me, but I want to know what is your passion and how did you find it?
[ 2m13s ] John Frey: Yeah, so it's a great question. My passion is helping people be the person they were meant to be and trying to do that myself as well. And because of the business I'm in as well, I'm always looking to say, how do I leave the world a better place when I leave the world than when I found it. So that drives me as well, although I have to say it took about 50 years to come to that perspective.
[ 2m37s ] Jeff Ma: Well, I don't know we'll have time to cover all 50 years, but maybe you could start us off at some maybe pivotal point because we are talking about servant leadership today. As kind of I know we talked before the show a little bit about um why that's important to you, but I'd love for you to share maybe where your focus and expertise and experience with servant leadership really started for you.
[ 2m55s ] John Frey: Yeah, it really started in the scouts and that was what the scouting program was all about was having leaders from the community of young people rather than having the adults be the leaders. And as I was coming through the scouts, my dad was my scout leader, but my dad was also a volunteer firefighter. And if you didn't lead teams of volunteers to respond, the community had no fire protection service.
[ 3s ] John Frey: And so I did that for a couple of years, went off to college and started volunteering at my university student run ambulance service. Again, the university, large university, almost 50,000 students at the time, there on the campus and all of the university grounds around uh almost an entire county in Texas. I went to Texas A&M University and the ambulance service was student run. So if someone dialed 911 or the campus emergency number and there were no responders there, the ambulance didn't respond.
[ 4s ] John Frey: So it was really about how can I lead other volunteers, make them feel included and make them want to keep coming back including some situations that frankly, um were really dangerous for them or certainly scary to them depending on what we were responding to at the time.
[ 4s ] Jeff Ma: I I love that thought process that I I went through when we first talked and you mentioned that. It it took me down this rabbit hole of incredible introspection and thought because I never thought of it this way, but when you when you have to lead volunteers, my wife leads the the PTA for the school and you know, everyone's giving their time freely, but it as a leader, it removes a lot of the levers that we rely on nowadays, right? Of like, oh, threatened, you know, threatening to fire or threatening like any sort of like, if you what are you going to do fire volunteer like, okay, bye, I'll just leave. You know, they they they lose nothing. And so all you're left with is influence and and positive influence for the most part. Making people feel valued, making people feel like and that's an incredible way to think about servant leadership because in in the business, there's so many other factors at play and I think all these other influences kind of get put to the wayside.
[ 5s ] John Frey: Well, they do. And in fact, what I I have discovered and it's my personal experience that continuing to lead groups of volunteers, and I continue to do that today, by the way. Um, made me a better leader in the business community because I didn't rely on those heavy-handed sorts of techniques. Really for me, leading was inviting people to be be part of a team that's off doing something better. So my team, I remind them all the time, we focused on technology efficiency, but the reason we're doing it is because the world wants to use technology and we make the world a worse place if we don't use technology efficiently and use technology to do some things that drive efficiency as well.
[ 5s ] John Frey: So I always try to point them back to that because so many, for example, in the sustainability communities that we're part of, think of their job in terms of lowering carbon footprint. And I like to keep reminding them, well, why is that important? Yeah. Because when we don't do that, the world is transformed in ways that impact marginalized communities that can't uh adapt to their changing environment. Either, you know, it's too hot, they can't grow crops anymore or they don't have access to fresh water. So for me it's, how do we motivate people to want to do their best in the role that they're in?
[ 6s ] John Frey: So they want to show up every day and and make that a part of their life because frankly, there's other places they could work or volunteer. So they're there because they want to make a difference and they're there because they like making a difference with the people they like being around and that they're spending a significant part of their life with. So for me, whether it was volunteer or paid, those were important principles to help people bring out the best of themselves and in in some cases learn a lot of new things or in our practice where we're constantly having to develop mechanisms and skills and approaches to do what we do. Nobody else said this is how it should be done and we're implementing. We're actually inventing the best practices we go. And that keeps people really excited and wanting to come back to work every day.
[ 7s ] Jeff Ma: Love it. And you know, you're on the podcast, Love is a business strategy. So I have to ask as we dive right into it, you know, what is what is your method or philosophy around how you incorporate love into how you lead? because we're talking about servant leadership, which is like this kind of defined term. Yeah. And and at times a little bit much because we're not, you know, there's a lot to it. There's a whole principle and everything. But at the end of the day, we are talking about the simple act of serving and putting other people's needs first. What does that look like for you as it pertains to like love and how you practice with your volunteer groups and with your your corporate or work group?
[ 8s ] John Frey: Yeah, so it's it's a great question and and part of it is meeting people where they are. Um at any given time on a large extended team, somebody's getting ready to get married, somebody might be going through a divorce, somebody might have just lost a spouse or a mother or a dad or had a child and all of that actually comes into that work interaction. If I'm about to put them on an ambulance for example, I want to make sure that I'm not sending someone out on a CPR in progress call that just lost a loved family member. Perhaps we'll do a quick staff shift for example or at least pay much more attention to them on the call.
[ 8s ] John Frey: Um, the same way at work, it's it's how do we let people be where they are? I had an employee just this last week whose family lives in Beirut and with all the conflict in Beirut, he was distracted. And when I finally said, why don't you go see your family for a little while and make sure they're okay so that you can be less distracted when you're back in the office.
[ 9s ] John Frey: Another way is really I don't ask my team to do anything I'm not willing to do first. So early on for example, in my experience with a rescue squad in Maryland where we were on a group of volunteers on every Friday night from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning, the inevitable things that are on there is washing the apparatus, checking to make sure you have all the medical supplies, all the way to cleaning the bathrooms. And so I as their leader took cleaning the bathrooms first and said, look, I'm not going to ask you guys to do something that you don't want to do or that you haven't seen me do.
[ 9s ] John Frey: And the same way down to cleaning the apparatus. I as a leader could have said, it's time, y'all go do that, but instead said, come on, I'm going to go do this. why don't you guys join me? And you get a really different reaction from people. And then we celebrate together and we cry together. If we lose a patient, for example, we would all take a moment and and remember that person. We did our best and we knew we did our best, but it wasn't enough in that particular circumstance or when one of our team wins or, you know, appears in a documentary or whatever, then we all rally around and celebrate that accomplishment as a group. And that I think helps the team come together. And that's where the love shines through that. That wasn't something we had to do, but it showed that we really care for one another. They're more than just co-workers or or other volunteers.
[ 10s ] Jeff Ma: And you know, when I think about the context of what you do in the group of volunteers coming together, it all makes so much sense. I think anyone hearing that story can kind of relate to how that love builds and how that how those those acts come about. Maybe you could help bridge though. I think more people are have more in common with your HPE environment than with that environment. So how do you bring that type of stuff? What does it look like once it's crossed the line into our jobs, our our paid jobs, our our our livelihoods and these corporate environments. What does that look like? Because it's not, you know, you're not you know, losing people in your work at least, you're not losing lives and gathering around and crying about it. But what might that look like instead?
[ 11s ] John Frey: Yeah. Well, some of the things are the same though. The the divorces and the births or the deaths in family, it is coming together. And and I will say in my HPE world, because I lead a global team, that's a little harder remotely. So I've I've managed to meet everyone on the team in person at some point in our time together, but that's not always the case. And so I'd I I try to understand if they're married, what's their spouse's name is and if there's some major life event, um, helping them through that as best I can or certainly being open to it.
[ 12s ] John Frey: I think the other thing is recognizing the cultural differences. I've got a very culturally diverse team, different religious traditions, different ethnic traditions, and in some cases, although not directly on my team, um they interact with other cultures where they're often not recognized as a first-class type of citizen. So it's how do we work through those, anticipate some of those opportunities and stand up and support them. If I have another team person from another team that says, I don't want to work with that person because of their ethnic background, as a leader, I can stand up and say, that's not how we do business with our company.
[ 12s ] John Frey: Uh, so let's work through this and I'll facilitate working through this together, but we're not going to have you exclude somebody just because of their ethnicity or something else. Um often it's it's gender as well. There's parts of the world that don't recognize or don't value in some cases the women on my team as much as they would value a man or don't give the same level of respect. And so we try to work through those situations as well. Because again, really what we're about is if the team succeeds, we help HPE succeed and HPE really at our underpinning want to be a force for good. So in everything we do, we try to drive that.
[ 13s ] Jeff Ma: It sounds like to some, a lot of work. You know? Like like we we come in, we have deadlines, we have projects, we have numbers to hit. And it's enough to do as it is. And everything you just said requires this extra effort, this extra thing that doesn't necessarily contribute directly to the bottom line or something like that. Again, I'm I'm voicing voicing what just for the listeners sake, it's not what I believe. Obviously, if you're here, you should know that. Um, but that's what you get, right? That's kind of where people go.
[ 14s ] Jeff Ma: So if, you know, what's keeping people, more people from doing this? What what makes it so hard for other people to try this? And and you know, how can we overcome that?
[ 14s ] John Frey: All great questions and in fact, that runs very parallel even with the domain that we're in that people perceive gets in the way, adds cost, and in fact, what we found is just the opposite. In the same way from a leadership perspective, um it does take some more work on the leader's part, no doubt. And it does require even looking at your own preconceived notions and biases, which frankly is hard to do. But for me, what I found is when you're willing to do that, um it actually makes a lot of things go faster and go quicker because you have confidence in your teammates, you know that they're watching your back and you're watching theirs in a metaphorical sense at least.
[ 15s ] John Frey: It also means that we can um accelerate some of our work together because some of the the cultural things that trip up other teams. And let's be clear, when most teams fail, often the number one reason is a human related failure, not a process related failure or something else. And it's because we didn't do the hard work at the beginning that facilitates better business outcomes. So I believe my team performs at a really high level, partially because of the way we interact with one another. We think of one another as more than just colleagues.
[ 15s ] John Frey: Um, when I meet my teammates that are in other countries in person, and I go to put out my hand, they want to hug. Um, and it's it's that kind of relationship that we've built and that enables us to do a much better job from that perspective. And we genuinely like one another as well. I mean, any person on my team if somebody said, here, do you want to go on a vacation for a week and go with them and their spouse? My wife and I would say, absolutely yes. They have seen my wife if only on video calls. I've seen them. We're on team calls and their animals come walking through.
[ 16s ] John Frey: That's really cool. It it shows that we're really getting to know one another at a deeper level. So I don't think it actually takes longer or costs more. I think it's a little upfront work that pays a lot of dividends downstream.
[ 16s ] Jeff Ma: Mm. Couldn't have put it better myself and and and what I'm hearing you say is that it comes down to relationships and it comes down to making sure we prioritize relationships as part of the work and not just as extraneous to the work.
[ 16s ] John Frey: Sure. And it also means, by the way, that we don't always agree with one another. And that's the other thing. I've purposely tried to build a really diverse team ethnically from difference of opinion because I think we get a better output at that point. And to do that though, we've got to have an environment where it's okay to question the boss, where I'm not viewed as the leader, I almost am viewed as a facilitator that lets us have a robust debate, figure out what we think is the right path forward and then go do that. So absolutely yes. So it's a variety of ways. Um, so not to suggest it's just a a path where we all always agree with one another. That's never the case. We would not have gotten to where we did if if we always agreed with one another.
[ 17s ] Jeff Ma: Of course. Uh, my last kind of curiosity in this, going back to this analogy of the volunteer moving into the corporate space. What is the equivalent of the the cleaning the toilets or the the the bathroom, like, you know, you say, I'll be the first to do this. I'm not going to ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. What does that look like when you translate that type of because to me that was like iconic servant leadership, right? Like you're serving others, you're doing something that you're you're kind of going first, you're putting yourself into like, you're showing and leading by example.
[ 18s ] Jeff Ma: What does that look like in corporate environments where, you know, cleaning toilets isn't necessarily on the list, but what does that look like instead?
[ 18s ] John Frey: Yeah, so there's a couple things. My folks are all on a technology career path. And so one of the things that path requires as they get to higher levels is to be mentored and to mentor others that are coming up the path behind them so that we don't have to learn the same concepts over and over as new people come in. And so in my case, um, I've tried to model that by both being a mentor to others, including others outside the group. So because again, it's a global function, I get younger technologist from all over the world that want to meet me, hear about my career path and be mentored.
[ 19s ] John Frey: And the same way, even though I'm a little over a year from retirement, I'm still being mentored because I think I always have something more to learn. So that's one way. Another way is we uh as a great benefit are given 60 hours a year to volunteer that HPE pays us to go out and and leverage our skills to volunteer with nonprofits. So rather than tell my team you should go do this, I I do it and then talk about that experience and I've just made it a normal part of our staff conversations to do those sorts of things.
[ 19s ] John Frey: For broader employee events, I'll volunteer to be on the logistics team for setting them up and taking them down. Another one and and it's one I mirror for my employees, particularly those that are at events with me is I speak at a lot of events a year, probably 50 or so events. And you know the people that always get ignored, that sound person that puts your microphone on you. Um, the logistics person that was there till midnight the night before making sure the staging was there and all of those things. I go out of my way to thank those people because it's a thankless job.
[ 20s ] John Frey: if you do great, nobody pats you on the back. If something goes wrong, you're sought at and criticized very early on. So for me it's going out of my way to notice those people and thank them. And and my staff at this point doesn't think I'm doing that just because they're around me, but they all notice because then they'll ask me later, why did you did you know that person? No, just met them. So why were you engaging with them? And my my point is, I'm no better than them because I'm on stage. I I I can't be effective on stage if I don't have all of these other people do their jobs well that bring it off. So helping them see that broader picture. So to me, those are just a couple examples of the cleaning the toilet or the job that people don't think that needs done or always wants to push to somebody else. I I try to make sure I mirror those behaviors.
[ 21s ] Jeff Ma: Love that. John, uh, learned a lot very very quick amount of time. Appreciate the time you've spent here. If anybody wants to connect, reach out or learn more, what what might they, what avenues might they take to find you?
[ 21s ] John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. So my website is drjohnfry. D r j o h n f r e y.com. And there you can learn a lot about my business life, my volunteer life, and even my ministry life. But if you want to reach out directly to me, uh the easiest way is John at drjohnfry.com.
[ 21s ] Jeff Ma: Awesome. So you're saying, reach out, connect,
WHERES THE REST OF IT
THIS FORMAT CAN BE EXPORTED IN TXT FILE
[ 0m0s ] John Frey: Let's be clear when most teams fail, often the number one reason is a human related failure, not a process related failure or something else. And it's because we didn't do the hard work at the beginning that facilitates better business outcomes.
[ 0m15s ] Jeff Ma: Hello and welcome to Love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business. We want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from. We believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I am your host, Jeff Ma, and as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories with real people about real business and really real life. And my guest today is Dr. John Fry, develop, and he develops and he leads HPE's practice for customer collaboration on sustainability and IT efficiency.
[ 0m58s ] Jeff Ma: John partners with HPE's largest customers, stakeholders and governments to develop low- carbon solutions to business challenges, share best practices and drive new business opportunities. And John frequently shares his knowledge with media all around the world, including in a documentary called Cloud 2, does cloud cost the Earth? And prior to HPE, HPE and Compact, he worked for Boeing, NASA and Arco Alaska.
[ 1m17s ] Jeff Ma: John developed his leadership skills both from earned degrees in engineering, divinity and leadership, and as well as being a leader and uh through leading volunteer emergency response teams for municipalities, government and academic institutions. He's an ordained pastor serving congregations for over 20 years and's both a minister and musician and he is my honored guest today here on this episode as we dive into servant leadership a little bit.
[ 1m44s ] Jeff Ma: So with that, John, how are you today? How are you doing?
[ 1m54s ] John Frey: I'm doing great. The sun is shining and uh it's a beautiful day out and a great day to talk about leadership as well.
[ 2m2s ] Jeff Ma: Every day is a great day to talk about leadership in my world, so absolutely. Uh, John, I I start with a question that never gets old for me, but I want to know what is your passion and how did you find it?
[ 2m13s ] John Frey: Yeah, so it's a great question. My passion is helping people be the person they were meant to be and trying to do that myself as well. And because of the business I'm in as well, I'm always looking to say, how do I leave the world a better place when I leave the world than when I found it. So that drives me as well, although I have to say it took about 50 years to come to that perspective.
[ 2m37s ] Jeff Ma: Well, I don't know we'll have time to cover all 50 years, but maybe you could start us off at some maybe pivotal point because we are talking about servant leadership today. As kind of I know we talked before the show a little bit about um why that's important to you, but I'd love for you to share maybe where your focus and expertise and experience with servant leadership really started for you.
[ 2m55s ] John Frey: Yeah, it really started in the scouts and that was what the scouting program was all about was having leaders from the community of young people rather than having the adults be the leaders. And as I was coming through the scouts, my dad was my scout leader, but my dad was also a volunteer firefighter. And if you didn't lead teams of volunteers to respond, the community had no fire protection service.
[ 3s ] John Frey: And so I did that for a couple of years, went off to college and started volunteering at my university student run ambulance service. Again, the university, large university, almost 50,000 students at the time, there on the campus and all of the university grounds around uh almost an entire county in Texas. I went to Texas A&M University and the ambulance service was student run. So if someone dialed 911 or the campus emergency number and there were no responders there, the ambulance didn't respond.
[ 4s ] John Frey: So it was really about how can I lead other volunteers, make them feel included and make them want to keep coming back including some situations that frankly, um were really dangerous for them or certainly scary to them depending on what we were responding to at the time.
[ 4s ] Jeff Ma: I I love that thought process that I I went through when we first talked and you mentioned that. It it took me down this rabbit hole of incredible introspection and thought because I never thought of it this way, but when you when you have to lead volunteers, my wife leads the the PTA for the school and you know, everyone's giving their time freely, but it as a leader, it removes a lot of the levers that we rely on nowadays, right? Of like, oh, threatened, you know, threatening to fire or threatening like any sort of like, if you what are you going to do fire volunteer like, okay, bye, I'll just leave. You know, they they they lose nothing. And so all you're left with is influence and and positive influence for the most part. Making people feel valued, making people feel like and that's an incredible way to think about servant leadership because in in the business, there's so many other factors at play and I think all these other influences kind of get put to the wayside.
[ 5s ] John Frey: Well, they do. And in fact, what I I have discovered and it's my personal experience that continuing to lead groups of volunteers, and I continue to do that today, by the way. Um, made me a better leader in the business community because I didn't rely on those heavy-handed sorts of techniques. Really for me, leading was inviting people to be be part of a team that's off doing something better. So my team, I remind them all the time, we focused on technology efficiency, but the reason we're doing it is because the world wants to use technology and we make the world a worse place if we don't use technology efficiently and use technology to do some things that drive efficiency as well.
[ 5s ] John Frey: So I always try to point them back to that because so many, for example, in the sustainability communities that we're part of, think of their job in terms of lowering carbon footprint. And I like to keep reminding them, well, why is that important? Yeah. Because when we don't do that, the world is transformed in ways that impact marginalized communities that can't uh adapt to their changing environment. Either, you know, it's too hot, they can't grow crops anymore or they don't have access to fresh water. So for me it's, how do we motivate people to want to do their best in the role that they're in?
[ 6s ] John Frey: So they want to show up every day and and make that a part of their life because frankly, there's other places they could work or volunteer. So they're there because they want to make a difference and they're there because they like making a difference with the people they like being around and that they're spending a significant part of their life with. So for me, whether it was volunteer or paid, those were important principles to help people bring out the best of themselves and in in some cases learn a lot of new things or in our practice where we're constantly having to develop mechanisms and skills and approaches to do what we do. Nobody else said this is how it should be done and we're implementing. We're actually inventing the best practices we go. And that keeps people really excited and wanting to come back to work every day.
[ 7s ] Jeff Ma: Love it. And you know, you're on the podcast, Love is a business strategy. So I have to ask as we dive right into it, you know, what is what is your method or philosophy around how you incorporate love into how you lead? because we're talking about servant leadership, which is like this kind of defined term. Yeah. And and at times a little bit much because we're not, you know, there's a lot to it. There's a whole principle and everything. But at the end of the day, we are talking about the simple act of serving and putting other people's needs first. What does that look like for you as it pertains to like love and how you practice with your volunteer groups and with your your corporate or work group?
[ 8s ] John Frey: Yeah, so it's it's a great question and and part of it is meeting people where they are. Um at any given time on a large extended team, somebody's getting ready to get married, somebody might be going through a divorce, somebody might have just lost a spouse or a mother or a dad or had a child and all of
that actually comes into that work interaction. If I'm about to put them on an ambulance for example, I want to make sure that I'm not sending someone out on a CPR in progress call that just lost a loved family member. Perhaps we'll do a quick staff shift for example or at least pay much more attention to them on the call.
[ 8s ] John Frey: Um, the same way at work, it's it's how do we let people be where they are? I had an employee just this last week whose family lives in Beirut and with all the conflict in Beirut, he was distracted. And when I finally said, why don't you go see your family for a little while and make sure they're okay so that you can be less distracted when you're back in the office.
[ 9s ] John Frey: Another way is really I don't ask my team to do anything I'm not willing to do first. So early on for example, in my experience with a rescue squad in Maryland where we were on a group of volunteers on every Friday night from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning, the inevitable things that are on there is washing the apparatus, checking to make sure you have all the medical supplies, all the way to cleaning the bathrooms. And so I as their leader took cleaning the bathrooms first and said, look, I'm not going to ask you guys to do something that you don't want to do or that you haven't seen me do.
[ 9s ] John Frey: And the same way down to cleaning the apparatus. I as a leader could have said, it's time, y'all go do that, but instead said, come on, I'm going to go do this. why don't you guys join me? And you get a really different reaction from people. And then we celebrate together and we cry together. If we lose a patient, for example, we would all take a moment and and remember that person. We did our best and we knew we did our best, but it wasn't enough in that particular circumstance or when one of our team wins or, you know, appears in a documentary or whatever, then we all rally around and celebrate that accomplishment as a group. And that I think helps the team come together. And that's where the love shines through that. That wasn't something we had to do, but it showed that we really care for one another. They're more than just co-workers or or other volunteers.
[ 10s ] Jeff Ma: And you know, when I think about the context of what you do in the group of volunteers coming together, it all makes so much sense. I think anyone hearing that story can kind of relate to how that love builds and how that how those those acts come about. Maybe you could help bridge though. I think more people are have more in common with your HPE environment than with that environment. So how do you bring that type of stuff? What does it look like once it's crossed the line into our jobs, our our paid jobs, our our our livelihoods and these corporate environments. What does that look like? Because it's not, you know, you're not you know, losing people in your work at least, you're not losing lives and gathering around and crying about it. But what might that look like instead?
[ 11s ] John Frey: Yeah. Well, some of the things are the same though. The the divorces and the births or the deaths in family, it is coming together. And and I will say in my HPE world, because I lead a global team, that's a little harder remotely. So I've I've managed to meet everyone on the team in person at some point in our time together, but that's not always the case. And so I'd I I try to understand if they're married, what's their spouse's name is and if there's some major life event, um, helping them through that as best I can or certainly being open to it.
[ 12s ] John Frey: I think the other thing is recognizing the cultural differences. I've got a very culturally diverse team, different religious traditions, different ethnic traditions, and in some cases, although not directly on my team, um they interact with other cultures where they're often not recognized as a first-class type of citizen. So it's how do we work through those, anticipate some of those opportunities and stand up and support them. If I have another team person from another team that says, I don't want to work with that person because of their ethnic background, as a leader, I can stand up and say, that's not how we do business with our company.
[ 12s ] John Frey: Uh, so let's work through this and I'll facilitate working through this together, but we're not going to have you exclude somebody just because of their ethnicity or something else. Um often it's it's gender as well. There's parts of the world that don't recognize or don't value in some cases the women on my team as much as they would value a man or don't give the same level of respect. And so we try to work through those situations as well. Because again, really what we're about is if the team succeeds, we help HPE succeed and HPE really at our underpinning want to be a force for good. So in everything we do, we try to drive that.
[ 13s ] Jeff Ma: It sounds like to some, a lot of work. You know? Like like we we come in, we have deadlines, we have projects, we have numbers to hit. And it's enough to do as it is. And everything you just said requires this extra effort, this extra thing that doesn't necessarily contribute directly to the bottom line or something like that. Again, I'm I'm voicing voicing what just for the listeners sake, it's not what I believe. Obviously, if you're here, you should know that. Um, but that's what you get, right? That's kind of where people go.
[ 14s ] Jeff Ma: So if, you know, what's keeping people, more people from doing this? What what makes it so hard for other people to try this? And and you know, how can we overcome that?
[ 14s ] John Frey: All great questions and in fact, that runs very parallel even with the domain that we're in that people perceive gets in the way, adds cost, and in fact, what we found is just the opposite. In the same way from a leadership perspective, um it does take some more work on the leader's part, no doubt. And it does require even looking at your own preconceived notions and biases, which frankly is hard to do. But for me, what I found is when you're willing to do that, um it actually makes a lot of things go faster and go quicker because you have confidence in your teammates, you know that they're watching your back and you're watching theirs in a metaphorical sense at least.
[ 15s ] John Frey: It also means that we can um accelerate some of our work together because some of the the cultural things that trip up other teams. And let's be clear, when most teams fail, often the number one reason is a human related failure, not a process related failure or something else. And it's because we didn't do the hard work at the beginning that facilitates better business outcomes. So I believe my team performs at a really high level, partially because of the way we interact with one another. We think of one another as more than just colleagues.
[ 15s ] John Frey: Um, when I meet my teammates that are in other countries in person, and I go to put out my hand, they want to hug. Um, and it's it's that kind of relationship that we've built and that enables us to do a much better job from that perspective. And we genuinely like one another as well. I mean, any person on my team if somebody said, here, do you want to go on a vacation for a week and go with them and their spouse? My wife and I would say, absolutely yes. They have seen my wife if only on video calls. I've seen them. We're on team calls and their animals come walking through.
[ 16s ] John Frey: That's really cool. It it shows that we're really getting to know one another at a deeper level. So I don't think it actually takes longer or costs more. I think it's a little upfront work that pays a lot of dividends downstream.
[ 16s ] Jeff Ma: Mm. Couldn't have put it better myself and and and what I'm hearing you say is that it comes down to relationships and it comes down to making sure we prioritize relationships as part of the work and not just as extraneous to the work.
[ 16s ] John Frey: Sure. And it also means, by the way, that we don't always agree with one another. And that's the other thing. I've purposely tried to build a really diverse team ethnically from difference of opinion because I think we get a better output at that point. And to do that though, we've got to have an environment where it's okay to question the boss, where I'm not viewed as the leader, I almost am viewed as a facilitator that lets us have a robust debate, figure out what we think is the right path forward and then go do that. So absolutely yes. So it's a variety of ways. Um, so not to suggest it's just a a path where we all always agree with one another. That's never the case. We would not have gotten to where we did if if we always agreed with one another.
[ 17s ] Jeff Ma: Of course. Uh, my last kind of curiosity in this, going back to this analogy of the volunteer moving into the corporate space. What is the equivalent of the the cleaning the toilets or the the the bathroom, like, you know, you say, I'll be the first to do this. I'm not going to ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. What does that look like when you translate that type of because to me that was like iconic servant leadership, right? Like you're serving others, you're doing something that you're you're kind of going first, you're putting yourself into like, you're showing and leading by example.
[ 18s ] Jeff Ma: What does that look like in corporate environments where, you know, cleaning toilets isn't necessarily on the list, but what does that look like instead?
[ 18s ] John Frey: Yeah, so there's a couple things. My folks are all on a technology career path. And so one of the things that path requires as they get to higher levels is to be mentored and to mentor others that are coming up the path behind them so that we don't have to learn the same concepts over and over as new people come in. And so in my case, um, I've tried to model that by both being a mentor to others, including others outside the group. So because again, it's a global function, I get younger technologist from all over the world that want to meet me, hear about my career path and be mentored.
[ 19s ] John Frey: And the same way, even though I'm a little over a year from retirement, I'm still being mentored because I think I always have something more to learn. So that's one way. Another way is we uh as a great benefit are given 60 hours a year to volunteer that HPE pays us to go out and and leverage our skills to volunteer with nonprofits. So rather than tell my team you should go do this, I I do it and then talk about that experience and I've just made it a normal part of our staff conversations to do those sorts of things.
[ 19s ] John Frey: For broader employee events, I'll volunteer to be on the logistics team for setting them up and taking them down. Another one and and it's one I mirror for my employees, particularly those that are at events with me is I speak at a lot of events a year, probably 50 or so events. And you know the people that always get ignored, that sound person that puts your microphone on you. Um, the logistics person that was there till midnight the night before making sure the staging was there and all of those things. I go out of my way to thank those people because it's a thankless job.
[ 20s ] John Frey: if you do great, nobody pats you on the back. If something goes wrong, you're sought at and criticized very early on. So for me it's going out of my way to notice those people and thank them. And and my staff at this point doesn't think I'm doing that just because they're around me, but they all notice because then they'll ask me later, why did you did you know that person? No, just met them. So why were you engaging with them? And my my point is, I'm no better than them because I'm on stage. I I I can't be effective on stage if I don't have all of these other people do their jobs well that bring it off. So helping them see that broader picture. So to me, those are just a couple examples of the cleaning the toilet or the job that people don't think that needs done or always wants to push to somebody else. I I try to make sure I mirror those behaviors.
[ 21s ] Jeff Ma: Love that. John, uh, learned a lot very very quick amount of time. Appreciate the time you've spent here. If anybody wants to connect, reach out or learn more, what what might they, what avenues might they take to find you?
[ 21s ] John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. So my website is drjohnfry. D r j o h n f r e y.com. And there you can learn a lot about my business life, my volunteer life, and even my ministry life. But if you want to reach out directly to me, uh the easiest way is John at drjohnfry.com.
[ 21s ] Jeff Ma: Awesome. So you're saying, reach out, connect, let's have a conversation. You're open to it. Love it.
[ 21s ] John Frey: Yeah, absolutely. I learn by learning from others as well. Um, and I am happy to share my experiences as well.
[ 21s ] Jeff Ma: Beautiful. Last and final closing question that I like to ask from time to time. What's one behavior you'll see every great leader do?
[ 22s ] John Frey: Oh, I think a great behavior is to acknowledge and recognize others because the leaders often get the credit for something that someone else did. So be really intentional of saying thank you.
[ 22s ] Jeff Ma: Love it. Thank you so much. and thank you to our leaders, uh, who are listening and our aspiring leaders who are listening. Um, we appreciate your support in the show. Hopefully you're still checking out the book. Love is a business strategy. Go visit uh Dr. Johnfry.com and also tell your friends, share the podcast. We'll be here every two weeks. So with that, we'll see you in the next one. Thank you and goodbye.