Applying Mission Command with Dean DiSibio

Welcome to Inspiring People and Places, where we interview national leaders in the architectural, engineering, construction, and development industry in an effort to educate, innovate, and inspire industry professionals to disrupt the status quo, improve their project teams, and steward public and private investments more effectively. I'm your host, BJ Kramer, president and CEO of MCFA. Allow me to introduce today's guest. Alright, inspiring people and places. Today our guest brings a varied background leading in all facets of his life.

Part time military, part time sales leader, full time leader, has a side business, he can correct me if I'm wrong, Colonel's Leadership Council, and wrote a book, co authored the book of Real, E E L, yes, two E's, Real Lessons in Leadership, a unique study of leadership portrayed in some of Hollywood's memorable movies. Can't wait to dig in. Dean DiSibio, welcome to the show.

P. J, thank you. Very excited to be here. Appreciate it.

Excited to have you. For our audience that is listening, not watching, Dean is wearing a Travis Mannion Foundation shirt. So I'm going to put him on the spot and ask him about what he's doing with Travis Mannion Foundation.

It's about five, six years ago. Interesting enough, it's odd how things come in different angles and it takes a couple for you to actually lean into it. So a salesperson of mine had mentioned the foundation and then through other acquaintances heard the same thing, great foundation, you should really look into it, we know you, it was something that speaks to you. Bottom line is I investigated the organization, got certified as an ambassador. And so what I do periodically is the character does matter workshops in different schools and organizations around the Delaware Valley and do one about once a quarter.

I'm engaged specifically with a particular engagement at the North Philadelphia School, where it's a little longer extension of the character does matter. So a six month work, bottom line, amazing story and legacy that Travis has and what his family has done to build this organization, both for the benefit of soldiers, certainly the family of soldiers that have been lost. And then also communities related to rising the character of America. It's amazing.

Yeah, I agree. We will put just because we made the note, we'll put it in the show notes, the Travis Mannion Foundation, if anybody wants to take a look at that. I have a number of friends and colleagues that are involved in different parts of that. So Dean, every show starts with us getting to know you. The industry that we're primarily serving is the architect, engineering and construction industry.

But this is a leadership podcast, so I think we can go a lot of different places. Talk to us about your career path from as early as you want to and kind of juggling the reserve commitment that you had as well as your professional civilian career.

Can do. I'll start with where I was born and raised, but I won't go that far back in unpacking. I was born and raised here in Marlton, New Jersey, left in eighth grade for twenty five years, had family moves, college moves, military moves, and then my first civilian job was away. Twenty five years later, I came back to Marlton and raised our family. So we have a 33 year old son and a 30 year old daughter.

And I throw that, that I really, if I look at it, three thirty year commitments that I'll unpack real quickly. One is the military one. So US Army started enlisted, went back to school, earned my commission, and then retired in 2014 as a colonel. And five and a half of that was on active duty, the rest of it as a reservist. And it's a true blessing to be able to serve with so many fine soldiers and loved every bit of it.

It was the impetus of why I formed Colonel's Leadership Council right after the retirement, that all that leadership that I learned, and in particular, the new leadership style that the Army had developed called Mission Command, that I felt really made a lot of sense for me and a group of veterans to be able to continue that work. Same industry for the last thirty years. So we'll call it the easier way for people to know to the sanitary maintenance industry, janitorial sanitary supplies. Think of this, keeping facilities clean and healthy. And certainly after the pandemic huge on keeping people healthy.

Yeah, for sure.

Really, a block and tackling industry, which I love, very simple, but has many interesting nuances. Fifteen of those years were with big large manufacturers started with Scott Paper, and then with SEJ, the family company on the commercial side. And then I went into the distribution end, always leading teams or leading teams of teams, sales specific. Today, as you know, and like most businesses, there's a lot of acquisitions going on. My company was sold to another company and we've gone through 62 acquisitions.

And today, I'm grateful to have a position of leading sales strategy for a national distributor, the largest national distributor of janitorial supplies, food service packaging, and industrial packaging. Most importantly, thirty five years married, my wife is the mayor of the town. She's been a teacher a long time and has done great things. We're blessed to have Anthony and Kayla. But I will also throw a connection.

I'm a Corps of Engineer Officer. And so projects and what your folks manage and deal and lead. But I'll also be clear, I'm not an engineer. I'm a very rare engineer officer who is a sociology major. I'll stop there.

That means you can play one on TV.

Very, very fair.

So I want to kind of bring those two things together, leadership and sales. And I think that it's probably one of the hardest positions to lead from is a sales position because it requires a lot of different styles to sell and then it requires even more styles to manage the people that sell. So talk to me about some lessons learned and your approach to leading a sales organization.

Very true. I've had the pleasure of leading folks that on a salary and we'll call it a bonus. And now I've had opportunity to lead sellers that are on straight commission. Both are uniquely different. So I'm a big believer I call it a name tag leadership is one is knowing each of your folks, what are their motivations, what is the journey that brought them to today.

And for that, at some level, you have to lead them differently. Keeping in mind that you have an overarching style in way that you manage people, we'll call it process and whatever you bring to market. I will say though, if we distill down to leadership, I'm a believer that our sellers, all sellers are leaders. They lead the sales process, right? Best ones involve a lot of people, they do a lot of collaboration and there's a team approach to being able to sell.

That, I treat them as leaders and professionals in how we approach it, how we train against it, how we build data and information, how we ensure that we have sales enablement tools to help them get to where they need to be, and how we ensure that we respect where those outcomes come. And there's a whole ton of coaching related to it.

Talk to me about some of those tools that enable that you guys use.

So when I think I try to keep things simple. And what I mean by that is if enablement is a means to do something or we'll call it a means to get to a goal, And then we'll call means or either an action or a system to bring that about. I think about sales enablement, one is data and the analytics related to it and how we share it. I think then also about what are some of the key systems that you can do. At the end of the day, you can only really grow three ways.

One is to get new business. One is to sell deeper, to keep your existing business and build deeper within it. And the next would be, we'll call it pricing, right? Some sort of escalation in how you put yourself. Having systems in all three of those areas that have depth and breadth to them, to me is those enablement tools that we all aspire to build, lead and ensure that positive outcomes come from.

That's great. I'm taking notes as we, not for the interview, but for my sales learning techniques. I want to jump back to something you said earlier, which was the topic of Mission Command and how that played into the Colonel's Leadership Council and your style. Talk to our audience about what Mission Command is and how you're taking that to other audiences through the Colonel's Leadership Council.

No, I appreciate the question. It's also how I, what I call I lead in the civilian sector. That's the neat thing is, leadership goes all places at work, home and Universal. Yeah, wherever it is, it's important. So I had to first just take a peek at where the military was when I came on board as a private, right?

Yeah.

So it was a commanding control environment. The bottom line is we were told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. And the intention was that we were never told why. By the way, it worked in the Cold War, which I certainly served through much of it. The reality is after nineeleven, that the asymmetric world that the military was and that we are today in world as a whole, for a new leadership style.

The Army developed a new one. Mission Command is the centerpiece of that. And the whole premise is all about guided initiative. It is actually to provide the why and not to have such a detailed, we'll call it mission orders that provide, we'll call it the guide rails, and also the vision of what right looks like at the end, the end state. And provides a bunch of different, I don't want to get over militaristic, different components like commanders intent as one as an example, that provide leaders the ability to actually execute mission command, to provide the right information, to allow people to know who, what, where, when, and what the end stage should look like and give them the ability to get there on their own initiative.

And in the world we will certainly serve through Afghanistan and Iraq and other difficult places, we needed soldiers and junior leaders to give them those guide rails. The military did a great job of building the, we'll call it the doctrine, Mission Command,

then

coaching, teaching and really ramping it up. And I was blessed to be in the training community that learned it and then in essence provided the conditions to train units true and frankly, then to be able to execute it myself. Got

it. And then who are the types of folks or clients that you're taking on in the Colonel's Leadership Council?

Today, it's friends and family. Time wise, it's just a small piece. The neat thing is I believe I I look at myself as a lifelong learner. So this drives me to continue to read and learn, which helps me in the civilian world. And so at any given time, I may do a workshop for municipality, for instance, and or work with local sports teams, which I've done at Cherokee, different sports teams on leadership and different parts from we'll call it the people that I know have asked me to do coaching and mentoring for folks one on one.

So it's taken a lot of different components. At any given time, I'll be working with one or two folks and I've been doing that since 14. The desire is never to retire someday from the corporate world. I've done from the army and then I'll do that forever.

That's great. So you brought up continuous learning and reading, Talk to us about the motivation and the content and maybe your highlight favorite story from the book, Real, R E E L, Leadership Lessons.

So my dad, Ralph DiSibio, has also been a leader in the corporate world and in the school world, education world for years. We've always talked about leadership. We also have a great love for the movies. And it was clear to us, it was a great way to connect those dots. And to have some, we'll call it, use pop culture to be able to teach it.

And so, we'll call it the premises, the leadership traits that a leader could possess or may not, to be able to tease them out, but then also to be able to shine a light on the ones that are being displayed and or not in the movies that most people have seen. So each chapter like in The Godfather and Apollo 13 or Aaron Brockovich, or Jobs, the Steve Jobs movie. We talk about the movie, but also very specific to the traits that are possessed, the ones that are challenged, and all in the spirit of shining a light on really what we think are the secrets of leadership. And those are the traits that leaders possess and having awareness into them, we think have great value.

Any specific story that is your favorite?

I'll go to Aaron Brockovich. And great movie. The premise of, we'll call it someone that has been part of them, we'll call it a tragedy. What I mean by that is if folks don't know about the movie, and I'll do it really quickly that there's water contamination that are happening in this community and people are getting really sick. And for that, no one knows why.

But it took one person, Aaron Brockovich, to have this amazing, we call it from the leadership traits, passion, but also an amazing level of preparation. And we really shine a big light on the one theme when she is in essence question about her research. And in that scene, she is not a lawyer, she works for a law firm, but she is asked by we'll call it a class A law firm, why maybe there are holes in her research. And what she does passionately, but accurately and with detail talks about each person, their particular situation, their backstory, their aunts, their uncles, their phone numbers, everything about them. And it shines a huge light on, you need to have passion to lead and you have to have a purpose in what you're doing and why, but the other is preparation is the key.

And she was highly prepared. We did not suggest that she was a leader, the ability to lead people, but she was the perfect leader of a project. And that's just one small peek at one of the books and one clip in particular.

It's a great one. Talk to me about the process to put the book together and how hard was it? How much work went into it? Was it just fun or how'd you stay disciplined?

Really hard, but I will tell you that my dad did the heavy lifting. What I mean by that is he started the book, I had eighteen months of active duty in 'five. Our unit was mobilized in support of the global war on terror. And it was all about the coaching and mentor of commanders and their leaders prior to them going over it. We have really special ways of going about doing that.

We had this discussion before that happened. And so all my discussions with him were, we weren't doing computers or texting, it was a lot of talk, and he was doing a lot of work. And so, you know, the idea was there before I went on active duty, but he did the hard work then. Of course, I got a chance to see the chapters give feedback in my spare time, which wasn't a lot, but at the end of the day, he did the hard work, I love influencing it. What we decided to do is for me to grab, we'll call it a more contemporary chapter, only a few years back, and we'll call it a contemporary thought related to leadership and that's emotional intelligence.

And so we added the jobs chapter, and we'll call it I took point for that. And all I can tell you, it wasn't easy, but it was fun. I thank goodness that my dad was my battle buddy. We'll call it in life, but in particular for that project.

So since you brought up emotional intelligence, let's dive into that a little bit. I'm curious how the chapter plays out. I haven't seen the movie. I've perused the book. I haven't read every chapter.

Steve Jobs was known as super charismatic, charismatic visionary, but also pompous, overconfident, over overly demanding. And, you know, to some the bad guy to others, a hero. So talk to us about what what the what the movie highlights and how it relates to emotional intelligence.

It's complex, as you just described. An amazing visionary leader. So it's a huge highlight on his ability to have a vision and bring that vision to reality. I mean, there's only a handful of people have ever done what he's done in the history, we'll call it

amazing.

So we obviously needed to recognize that for all the right reasons. The other is, think like all of us, he had flaws, right? And one of those is, he was not tapped into his emotions and not only personally, but how they affected others. And for that, he had a lot of strained relationships. His emotional intelligence rose over time And that's the neat thing about these, you can go by each of the, we'll call it every trade leader could possess and you could talk about, are you born with it or can you develop them?

But the reality is, for the most part, all of them you can develop. So he developed it over time, but we put a real, we shined a light in very particular scenes where his lack of emotional intelligence had an impact on the people he led negatively related to morale, related to culture. You know, there's a pivotal scene, and I won't get the quote right and I apologize, but Steve Wozniak, which was his right hand best buddy and totally different in their capabilities and strengths, both geniuses because of the friction, because Steve Jobs would not recognize the great work by engineers per se over time in many projects, that that friction bubbled up into one very pivotal scene where amongst everyone and much of his undressing of people was in front of everyone, what I mean by Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak pushed back, I'm sure more than once, but in this pivotal scene said, being nice and brilliant doesn't need to be binary. You actually can do both.

And by the way, there's a lot more flavor and friction to that.

Sure.

The movies, know, the book, the movie, and even our chapter, which is a small piece of anything by any means, I think shows how important emotional intelligence is today and needs to continue to be in what we do and how we lead.

Yeah, I agree. Inspiring people in places is brought to you by MCFA. MCFA is a CVE verified service disabled veteran owned small business. At MCFA, our why is to inspire people and places through project leadership. We provide planning, strategy, program management, and construction management support services to a wide variety of public and private sector clients.

Switching gears, some rapid fire questions, most gifted or most recommended book?

I'm gonna throw a bunch out. I would say it depends on the outcome you want, right? What are you looking to achieve? If it's big business and how people have someone that did a great job at Best Buy, the heart of business, Jolie, J O L Y, great book. If it's a process from a high leadership perspective, the CEO challenge, great book.

Junior leaders, Angela Duckworth, great book. If it's breaking down silos in business and having teams of teams, General McChrystal's book team of teams, outstanding. We will also tie you into Mission Command, because it gets noted within it and you'll see the components, but an outstanding book.

Favorite quote.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. Colin Powell, really one of my favorite leaders, and studied him and his leadership style and his tenants leadership and a big believer in that.

It's interesting, I just had a debate with somebody the other day. I guess there's something called toxic positivity going around right now.

Right.

I was making I was asking them to explain to me how that you know, how that may differentiate from optimism. And I guess it comes down to ignoring the truth versus Admiral Stockdale quote from Good to Great when he talks about, you must never lose sight of the facts while at the same time remaining positive or optimistic that you'll work through it. And that's what it essentially came down to in our conversation was we both agreed. So toxic positivity, I guess, is this like, there's nothing wrong. We're good.

We're good. We're good as opposed to a positive mindset like, hey, yeah, we have issues, but we're going to continuously improve. We're going to get better. We're going get better. Apparently it was the first time I had heard the term toxic positivity, but apparently a new terminology around

that. Appreciate you sharing that. I think there's great validity in lack of transparency. Yeah. And there is a premise of any strength is overused.

That's right.

And so I like that, I wrote it down and I think there's really is something too interesting enough Coleman Powell knew that before that term was and if you read or you look that up and he teases that out and in some ways addresses that a bit, that grim reality is still important to note. Not that I'm saying exactly the way he did, but he got that nuance but that was the kind of leader he was.

He also had the quote and I mean, it's an age old quote, everything's better in the morning.

It's classic, right?

That is true. For some reason at 2AM when your head gets spinning with all the issues, those issues feel a whole lot bigger. Alright, if you could have dinner with three people dead or alive, who would they be?

I had Colin Powell, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King.

Oh, those are good. Those are very good. We talked a lot about what doing. You're still doing a corporate job. You retired the Reserves.

You're involved in the Travis Mannion Foundation and the Command or Colonel's Leadership Council. What else are you doing and involved with? Or maybe inside of that, I'm keenly interested in what you might be teaching youth sports teams when you go in as part of the CLC?

Blessed to have not great family, friends, kids, so that you've described is me. So that's pretty much it, big book, Travis Mannion and we'll call it soldiers health. To me, it's a combination, I'll just add one piece. I mean, that to me is really important. I do believe that we had a greatest generation and wasn't ours and it was my grandfather's and so forth.

But the folks that started to serve prior to nineeleven and have done since then and continue through all that, I really do believe is the next greatest generation. And so I'd like to stay connected in that space. The Carl Leadership Council has a cadre of other leaders. And the idea is how do we continue to ensure that we're healthy and that continues to grow in that space. On the school side, which I really enjoyed, and I don't have a particular engagement at the moment, but we really stay focused to helping the young folks understand, you know, what is leadership?

How do you define it? Are you born with leadership skills or can you develop them? But then what we do is we allow them to uncover that the traits are important. We allow them to brainstorm all the traits that they think leaders could possess when they think about their teachers, their parents, their teammates. And from that, we ask them to decide which ones are the most critical for their team, their success, personally and professionally.

And then we'll focus on, again, this has been, you know, for years we've been doing it. We'll focus on individual leadership traits and tease them out, sometimes put movies to them and Netflix or Amazon. There's so many great ways to connect to our kids today and early

people, That's great. And then last question. What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want on your tombstone?

A good portion to all. That's it.

Simple but powerful.

I'm trying. I'm not saying I'm living up to it all the time. All we

can do.

It is that premise of a lifelong learner, I'm continuing to learn.

And then if you would just close us out with any inspiration or parting comments to our audience.

I'll throw out to the engineers and the folks a bit. Colin Powell, great leaders were also great simplifiers. And so I really believe in it. The other is think a little bit like a sociologist also, by the way, a great respect for the profession, the engineering profession and the craft. I've worked with so many over so many years, but you ensure that art gets recognized, Why is that building there?

Who cleans it? What are we looking? What are we trying to do there? Think about people and the art side, a little bit like a sociology along with doing all the great work that they do today.

I think you just hit on the art of urban planning and planning, which is what MCFA does. We often say it's part sociology, our business, understanding stakeholders, engaging stakeholders, looking at the problems from a number of different perspectives. I even tee Dean up for that close, but get the pitch in for MCFA while we're at it. Dean DiSibio, thanks for everything you're doing in Leadership. Thanks for taking the time to join us on the podcast and appreciate you.

Thank you. Been my pleasure. Have a great rest of the day.

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