Transcript

Joe Mills: What shared experiences motivate today’s business leaders to keep growing and how have their unique stories impacted the way they enable others to do the same? I’m Joe Mills,

Reid Morris: and I’m Reid Morris,

Joe Mills: and we’re investigating what and who it takes to build companies that foster growth in people and business.

Reid Morris: Then we’re sharing those stories with you.

Joe Mills: This is 1,000 Stories, an original show from Element Three.

Reid Morris: Alright, Joe. So, what are we gonna talk about?

Joe Mills: So we’re starting with Tiffany to kick off our podcast.

Reid Morris: Yep.

Joe Mills: Mostly because the premise of building people really stems from her vision and what she sees for Element Three.

And so I want to talk to her particularly about how did this idea of growing the community come about? Not so much just personal growth, which if I’m totally transparent is where like I am really focused on personal growth. I’m 29. A lot of goals for myself — feels very me-centered. And Tiffany said something at an exercise we had with our EOS implementer, Justin, it was called a personal VTO day.

VTO stands for vision traction organizer. So it’s helping you organize what is the vision you have for the future and how are you going to gain traction toward that vision? Hence VTO. So it’s setting a destination you want to go for, and then trying to build a map to take you to that destination. And in that room, a lot of us voiced a feeling that I just said where it’s very, self-centered. My goals are very me.

And it’s awkward to admit that a little bit and you feel this sense of that’s not enough. I need to be doing more for the people around me, but there’s this tug of war between I need to focus on myself and I’m trying to focus on those around me. And Tiffany said something in response to us feeling that tension, which was essentially, you have to go through it yourself in order to expand it.

I wanna understand where does that perspective come for her? Was it learned? Was it taught? Is it all experiential? Just unpack that statement because it sat with me for almost a year now and we did it last fall with Justin.

Reid Morris: And the two of us, too, are people who I think really experienced that, like being at a place with yourself before you can move on to other people.

And obviously the people in that room too, right. Everybody is very bought into this mission of fostering growth in people, in business, changing the world, right? Having this impact. But everybody shares that same feeling of ‘am I at a place where I’m ready to do that for the people around me?’ And I think the other piece of that, that you’ll be able to pull on is not only how did she get to those different steps, learning it from family, whatever that is, but also why.

Choosing growth is not an easy thing to do. Choosing to constantly change constantly transform improve. You don’t need to do that. There are people who are in a great spot who don’t do that, but why did she choose to take on this thing that she didn’t necessarily need to do? And why did she choose to then expand it to the impact that she has today and the community beyond the walls of Element Three.

Joe Mills: Yeah. It’s interesting to think about the consistent choice because when you accomplish a goal or you grow to a certain level, you have a choice of like, am I gonna stay here? And now I know how to do this. I have the playbook for how to do this, or am I going to say, okay, what’s the next hard thing.

I’ve never really thought about staying somewhere, but it’s interesting to think about like, oh, that could be a thing so why do we continually wake up and choose to do another hard thing? And really we’re doing a hard thing that Tiffany’s help setting the vision for what the next hard thing the company is doing.

So, yeah, I am interested in that. And also interested, like we’re gonna open up with a consistent question in these interviews and with her, I’m just curious where she’s gonna take it. Is she gonna go personal? Is she gonna go professional? Is she gonna go her- centered? Is she gonna go we-centered? Is it gonna be community?

Is it gonna be the business? Like what is her response to that question’s gonna be, and I’m gonna leave the question so people can listen and hear what it is, but I’m interested in what she goes because I think that’ll give a direction for the rest of the conversation as well.

Reid Morris: Yeah, and it’ll provide context for the rest of these conversations that we’re going into, where people are very different points in their journey, right?

Somebody who’s built a business and been a part of that 17, 18 years versus once you have conversations with people who may be our business leaders, but are earlier on in that process all the way down to people who aspire to be these leaders, right? Yeah. Both where they are in their journey, what has brought them to that point in their journey and the ‘why’ — that underlying ‘why’ behind it is gonna be very different.

And this will set a very interesting base of context for the rest of those conversations and Tiffany who’s a little bit further along in that journey.

Joe Mills: Yeah, totally.

Reid Morris: So, I guess the gist of what we’re trying to get outta this is build that foundation. So going in saying, why do you choose to do this? What is this thing in your history that continues to drive you forward? And sort of talk about the inflection points that lead to growing and being comfortable in self versus E3 and beyond.

Joe Mills: Awesome. Sounds good.

Reid Morris: Cool. Thanks Joe.

Joe Mills: Well, welcome Tiffany. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tiffany Sauder: Yeah, let’s do it. This is great.

Joe Mills: To start, I’m gonna ask this question and take it any way you want to — where are you focused on growing currently?

Tiffany Sauder:  In some ways actually, I think my growth journey is almost full circle in that I actually find myself working on growing myself right now.

They talk about like hitting the ceiling or the law of the lid, where the leader becomes the thing that defines where the organization can rise to. And as I have gotten to a place where I’ve been able to share or delegate some of the key things that I was solving and not that I’ve mastered them, cause I don’t know that I’ve mastered them, but I do find myself going into a new frontier right now in my own development as a thought leader in my own development in really building leaders.

And some of it is an exercise of claiming and capturing what it is that I know. And exporting is certainly part of that cause you get caught in the wake of that process a lot of times, Joe, but I see ahead the opportunities that are coming for the organizations I’m a part of and the people that I’m leading, that they’re gonna be bigger than where I’ve been.

And so I feel myself really focusing on being able to more crisply see what the next level looks like, so that I can lead others well to that. So yeah, it was really about fighting for myself and then fighting for the team and then really learning how to lead in a way that served even a community that was bigger than just the employees that chose to work for the organizations I was apart of.

Joe Mills: You said that it’s coming full circle. I, in my head, see this as sequential or saw it as sequential walking in the room. Have you felt that cycle happen before?

Tiffany Sauder: It’s a good question. I think there’s seasons. This is maybe kind of nerdy, but what’s coming to mind is we live in a very agrarian environment here in Indiana.

And so there’s seasons of planting. There’s seasons of growing and there’s seasons of harvesting. And then once you harvest actually like take the grain to market and somebody else has it. And I think there’s different functions of my career, my job, or the things I know how to do, where I have planted it. I’ve grown it.

I’ve harvested it and I’ve sold it to somebody else. And so maybe it is sort of like a new plot of land. I feel myself sewing seeds again into like new untied soil. So I have something I can grow so that I can that harvest it and I can give it to people like you. In this particular space of my growth I’m clearing space so that I can really be discovering, learning, investing in my own next level so that I can feel confident and lead well the people who have trusted me with their careers and futures and all that.

Joe Mills: You talked about at the start, this idea of the leader, being the cap on how far everybody else can get when you aren’t having other people say to you, I need you to grow here. I think one of the major differences between being an aspiring leader in like a business and being an actual full on leader who’s responsibility is to help grow the whole thing.

And I think this probably extends to your household as well. When you’re the kid, you just follow your parents and they’re like, yep, you’re going here, you’re going there. This is your high school, blah, blah, blah. And then eventually you have to start making your own decisions. Whether that be a college, postgraduate, whatever, as you’ve leveled up.

And there’s not somebody to tell you, here’s where you’re going next. What’s the process like for you to go explore that?

Tiffany Sauder: I’m highly intuitive, which doesn’t leave a lot of process in my wake. Of the repeatable kind that people would prefer. And so I think for me, it’s a feeling there’s two things.

One is I think I observe on my calendar that there’s a lot of things I know how to. I don’t prep for a lot of stuff when I feel no fear in my week. And I’m just like exporting. I’m like, I’m doing a lot of things I probably kind of already know how to do, which maybe isn’t what I should be doing.

Joe Mills: Can we just hit the pause button there and go into the fear thing for a second.

I feel like that’s a really big part of your story, which you’ve talked about. We don’t need to the whole thing, but even when you started your show with Scared Confident, there was a lot of this focus on fear and what it does. How has that changed? Does that still a piece that you’re focusing on finding?

Cause what you just said sounds like you hunt it now.

Tiffany Sauder:  I do hunt it. I love the feeling of being on the edge. It gives me an enormous amount of energy and it’s the place I discover. I’m really terrible at like learning, not in real life. And so I have learned, I really learn in the laboratory of life. I mean, my podcast, I knew what it was called before I knew what it was about.

Which is probably not the way I advise it, but I just had to go on the journey of making it. And I just trusted that it would find form that it would have purpose. And I just jumped into the journey before I knew exactly where it was pointing me and that’s just how I’ve learned.

That’s how I solve. It’s how I pay attention. It brings my senses to life when I’m in a place of uncertainty and it’s where I’m like maximum sponge.

Joe Mills: Okay. So you find the fear and when you’re not fearful, you start to realize I to level up.

Tiffany Sauder: Yeah, I think I get a little bit bored. There’s a couple narratives.

I think that roll around in your head a lot as leaders. I think it’s different for everybody, but one of mine is that I’ll be the last to know that I’m not right for my role anymore. You know, everybody else is like, she needs to stop. I think that paranoia, I think that sense of, I wanna be the first to notice that I should probably be vacating this role.

I’m really good at the messy beginning. Like there’s nothing there and somebody needs to form it. I’m like great at that. Cause I’m not intimidated by it. I’ll make decisions. I’ll figure some things out. I can give it some shape, you know this, when it needs to scale, I need to get out of the way because people can’t hang on to my intuition as a way to learn how to do something. One thing

Joe Mills: One thing that popped into my head. I have a fun job at Element Three in the sense that I get to know first that something big and new and fun is coming in. And that was you for a really long time. You were the first person to know that something big and new and fun was coming in.

And I think about if I were to take myself outta that role, you know, move me somewhere else and somebody else got to be in that seat, that my ego would be unhappy about that for a period of time. So you’ve, let’s say with six roles and a lot of times. I feel like every step brings you farther away from the front lines and like the ugly beginning has your ego reared up in those moments?

Tiffany Sauder: Yeah it can be hard to not be needed in the same way by the organization. And I’ve been here for almost 20 years and things that can be weird are like, yeah, when we had huge client presentations and at the end of it, either something great or something sucks is gonna happen at the end. I was like there at ground zero and I was in it.

I apart of the adrenaline squad. You were there the night before prepping. There’s a lot of relationship and inside jokes and things that form when you’re in the heat of it together, and then I was in it. And that makes you feel really useful professionally when you’re in those moments or it’s like, you’re on a team and everybody’s like, Hey, let’s go to lunch.

I don’t get invited. I’m not complaining, but it is these weird things of you give your life to it. And if you do it really well, it needs you in different ways. And so it does take some maturity. I think to realize Element Three actually needs me in more strategic ways today than when I had more visible roles in like executing the work.

But you’re right, that when your ego gets wrapped up in that being the work or your team, your like colleagues recognition of how good you are at the work, that it can be a lid on the organization when that’s the thing that you’re looking for. Cause I mean, I dunno, half the people here at Element Three, probably never even seen me do marketing before.

You know? I mean, it’s a little bit funny. I’m guessing there’s a lot of people who have never even seen me do a marketing thing and that’s good. And sometimes it’s weird, you know.

Joe Mills: Paralleling back to the beginning where I talked about your phrase of me, us, them at the start, have your roles followed that same pattern?

Tiffany Sauder: Yeah, I think your heart kind of has to go first in those transitions because otherwise I think you’re fighting reality a little bit. So what I mean by that is, yeah, when I first started Element Three, I was trying to figure out, am I even a credible professional? The first leg was very much me just trying to understand myself professionally, whether or not my brain was pulling the right threads.

I like to win things, even if I don’t really know what I’m competing for. And I was not like an athlete or anything of the sort, so I think this like sport of business is kind of where I found a scoreboard. I also have a really high need for approval and so performance and being smart was part of how I fed my ego, I think.

And so that feedback of you’re smart, you’re bright. See good things that fed me professionally.

Joe Mills: It’s interesting to hear you use the scoreboard analogy, because I would say in the last couple of years, I’ve heard you use the training ground metaphor a lot more with business. You talk about the world of business, being a playground to practice life.

And if you knew somewhere else to teach life better, that’s where you would do it. Did you always feel that way? Or was it a scoreboard and it changed to a training ground?

Tiffany Sauder: Well, I actually think they’re one and the same, because think about anybody who’s an athlete. And the reason that you train so hard is because you want to see what the score is at the end.

Not just because you wanna participate and run a play. And so I think that intensity of a scoreboard, whether it be financial, whether it be the number of compliments you get in the day, whether it be renewals, whether it be like, you know, whatever it looks like. I think that kept me. In the game of training and it helped me know whether I was making progress towards or away from what I was trying to make happen.

And this is why I even think marriage is slowly, all of a sudden, just break up and go away is because while there is a scoreboard, there’s not a visible one. And that’s why I say like, business is such a great training ground. It’s literally every 30 days you get a financial statement that says whether or not you won or you lost.

 Now, not every losing financial statement means that you’re making the bad decisions and not every winning financial statement means you’re making the right decisions, but get enough data points and directionally you’re probably on the right or the wrong path. And so I think that it’s taught me.

I stepped into hard conversations, much faster with clients than I did with my husband, because I needed a renewal. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, because I needed to hit my financials.

Joe Mills: There was a timeline.

Tiffany Sauder: Totally. Think about some tough calls you’ve had to make to prospects. It’s like, because somebody’s gonna be in your face on your Tuesday morning meeting, if you don’t have clarity on it.

And so you’ll pound through those calls the week before, and it’s just, it forces cycles because I had something visually, I was looking.

Joe Mills: Yeah, I mean, you and I have a lot of similarities in the way that we view life in general I think. And the timeframe and a scorecard that I’m accountable for makes me act differently than my life where there’s really no, like finish line.

Not that there’s okay well, in 2023, everything’s finished, but there’s like, okay, every morning meeting, these to-dos need to be done because there’s a finish line on a weekly basis that certainly resonates with me. And it trained you to show up better outside of the training ground.

Tiffany Sauder: Totally. And if we like actually applied things like 360 reviews and stay interviews and 90 day plans and performance improvement plans into our personal relationships.

I mean, it, you know, everybody laughs, but like really. What would it look like if we treated it that way and we didn’t keep just putting it off till tomorrow? Yeah. That’s part of why I say like, I think business is just a training ground for life. I am a much better communicator.

I’m much more self aware of what I’m good and what I’m bad at. I am much better at conflict resolution. I am much better at articulating my view of the future. I am much better at working with others. I am much better at forming a well balanced team. I am much better at all of those things because of my professional life.

And my church and my family and my kids, they get the spillover effect of that really intentional refinement that I really don’t think I would have been brave enough to do in my personal life alone.

Joe Mills: I was gonna ask that stems on the question that was coming into my mind of Element Three’s a successful business.

Your other efforts are successful. You don’t have to get better. Why always look for the next growth thing? Cause growth is uncomfortable. Leveling up is actually really uncomfortable. Cause you have a playbook for what already worked. It’s like, yep. Run that play again. It’ll work again. Running it again.

It’ll work again. I can stay right here forever. Is it much harder, much more uncomfortable, much scarier to go find the next thing. Where am I bad at? Find my weak spots. Where’s my business need to improve, etc. Where’s that motivation come from for you?

Tiffany Sauder: I think at the end of the day, I just really believe that like, when I was made, God just packed a lot in me.

And I just feel like I have a responsibility to ring out every last ounce of who I was made to be. And I think the refinement process, it just brings me purpose. And I think it gives me a peace actually, as I think about it, there’s just like a peacefulness that comes with I’m staying in it.

Joe Mills: It’s actually interesting to hear, as you talk about the beginning Element Three, and you talk about now, there’s actually a different pronouns you use, which is really interesting to me.

I know when I started here, so five and a half years ago, which for me feels like a long time, but then I think about it’s really not a very long time at all. When I came in Element Three, as a brand it was very collegiate in nature. It was very competitive in nature. And you talk about proving myself. Was there an inflection point where you went from me to us?

Tiffany Sauder: Yeah, it was very actually specific for me mentally. I had this self created chip on my shoulder. When we first started in this market of like, nobody’s looking for us to be successful. I don’t come from the city. I don’t come from the industry. Nobody knows who we are. I don’t have networks in relationships as it can just sort of like create this company for me.

And I felt like, I don’t know that people were betting against us. They weren’t betting for us. And I actually remember very specifically a conversation I had with a well known tech investor in town. And he told me basically what I would do is I would run it for cash, this business, and like pay your mortgage off.

And if you can do that, honey, you’ve crushed it. And I was like, that’s basically assuming you’re not gonna have a business that continues. Basically like do as best you can while you’re hot and then you won’t be, and then it’ll be done. And I was like, man, that sure didn’t feel like a vote of confidence.

So I had this chip on my shoulder that I hated everybody who wasn’t us. I was like, I’m just gonna show them whoever they are that they’re wrong. That we have something to say, we’ve got something to do. We’ve got value to bring. I’m gonna find people that believe that, and we’re gonna do this thing. And then I remember we got to number one on the IBJ Booker list.

And I asked myself, what is the responsibility that comes with being number one? And all of a sudden, it like flipped for me. I was like, you help people up the hill. And so then I was like, okay, now we help people up the hill. So it did become about how do we expand? How do we be generous in what we’ve learned? How do we be generous in what we train? How do we be generous in what we believe? How do we help people up the hill?

Joe Mills: When you thought about people up the hill, who were you thinking of at that point? Did you have anybody in mind?

Tiffany Sauder: There’s certainly some other people in adjacent businesses to ours that we have pretty close relationships with where we, I don’t know.

I don’t wanna say like shared trade secrets, but we’re pretty open books. This is what we’re doing. Like, I hope it helps you too. I think I just started to see that taking ownership for the Indianapolis community at large and. It’s like a big parachute. All of us need to like, hang on to our little section in front of us.

But that was gonna be better for everybody. I mean, there’s still times we compete head to head with our competitors and I want them to lose, but I think I started to see, like there really is enough for everybody, there really is. And those who are good should have space to win.

Joe Mills: That feels like element three is at number one and all the people on element three have driven up the hill on the same bus together.

At that point. Were you already thinking outside of the E3 walls or were you like, okay now we’re like everybody around Element Three, our key partners, the people who have helped us along the path, I’m gonna help them. Cause even in your intro, you mentioned all of the things that you’re doing and you didn’t bring your identity back to element three as a whole,

Tiffany Sauder: I will say I have had to do to separate my identity as a human from my identity as a CEO of Element Three. There was a season where that was so blurred. It was very unhealthy for me in my relationships. It was like, I didn’t know how to breathe if I wasn’t working on Element Three, I didn’t know who to be or how to introduce myself.

If I was not the CEO of Element Three.

Joe Mills: Was that before or after the inflection point you talked about?

Tiffany Sauder: Probably after. Yeah, we climbed to number one. Now we help people up the hill. But in my head I was fighting hard to like, keep my place. You know what I mean? I actually had to go through the mental exercise of being okay with Element Three completely failing.

That was the only way I could get myself disconnected from it, like mentally going through the exercise of laying everybody off, shutting it down, turning the keys in, like everything. I had to mentally go through that process and be like, who are you? If all of that is gone, the notice went out in the newspaper.

All of your employees have posted on LinkedIn that they need jobs. Like the maximum embarrassment happens. Like, who are you? What do you do think going through the fear journey and exploration on Scared Confident, help me finish the replacement process of if I am not my roles. And you’ve done a lot of work on IR theory too.

If I am not my roles, who am I instead? Or who am I actually? And it was then, and I think the sort of new lease on life that I have of like, well, if I am for others, what does that mean? And I think it gives me this urgency in my own growth to be like, the more I have, the more I’ve soaked up, the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve seen, the more I’ve experienced, the more I have to give to the people who have all these big ambitious dreams, goals and these like huge lives they want to live. I get a lot of energy in being an agent for that to happen for other people.

Joe Mills: You mentioned Scared Confident, and that process and the fear journey that you went on. What year was that?

Tiffany Sauder: I started the process in the fourth quarter of 2020. And then I would say like publicly shared that with the world in the first quarter of 2021, I feel like lots of people came out of COVID with just life experiences.

We’ll leave it at that. Some good, some bad when the oh 08, 09 recession came, I really didn’t know at all what I was doing. And so as I was leading Element Three through something hard. A decade later, it was really a way for me to prove to myself. I do know how to lead through crisis and exporting a lot of those key learnings.

And then I had a fourth kid that was not my plan. God’s plan, not my plan and everything was disrupted and I love control and consistency and systems, and none of that existed in my life. And so for some reason that was a trigger for me to just push more deeply into like, what am I supposed to be?

Actually, what am I supposed to be?

Joe Mills: I mean, an observation from the outside of you. Is that you are more involved in more things post the launch of Scared Confident than you were before. Have you felt like a freedom to go chase it?

Tiffany Sauder: For sure. I think there’s two things. One is I trust what’s in place at Element Three in a way that I couldn’t have a couple years before that.

And that’s more me thing than it is an implication of the team’s ability. So some of it’s that, the stability of what exists at Element Three. Some of it is I just think that there’s been some really interesting opportunities that have come in front of me, where it’s in line with being for others, with helping leaders that I really believe in grow and making room for the leadership team at Element Three.

Joe Mills: One of the things I’m hearing in this conversation is moving from the me to us to them. And then going through that cycle repeatedly requires building up of myself, transferring that to the us around us, and then like fully letting go of who that means I am and the roles that I get to play and then going and doing it all over again.

And every time I run that circle again, We drink the faucet of Jim Collins. If I build myself, I can’t help, but tell it to others and teach them and they can’t help, but do it better. And then I can help, but free me up to go learn more, which means I get good at it again. And it’s like this, personal little that’s flywheel.

Tiffany Sauder: I had not observed that, Joe, but that is a really sound summary of, you’re right.

Joe Mills: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. As you’re running that little flywheel right now, I know from where I see you have lots of tentacles out and learning lots of things in new areas, new arenas, what are you really excited about?

Tiffany Sauder: When my kids were born? I said, when they get to middle school, I want to have more time flexibility. That doesn’t mean I don’t work. That doesn’t mean I don’t have lots of passions, but just more time flexibility. And that is coming true. And so I’m really grateful for that. My middle school girls just need a mom in a way that when they’re three, they don’t, you know, and so just being able to hang around sometimes is good.

And so I’m excited for that stage of my life and being able to be available for them. I also like sincerely love to see people like you and the leadership team at E3, people come in and say, when I started Element Three, this was my. Like Sarah she’s like, I wanted to find a place where I knew it was possible for me to join the executive team.

And in six months ago she joined the executive team and to see the things that I’ve spent my life building, be able to help facilitate other people’s goals and dreams and what that allows in their lives when they’re financially successful. That’s a flywheel too. And I think that’s the thing that continually gives me the courage to step aside.

Even if it fails, everybody will have learned something. You can’t not learn. You know? And so when that’s your goal, I think the like highs and lows of the wins and losses, you don’t feel I’m quite as hard cuz you’re just like learning and paying attention to the game and engaging really hard and caring a lot about one another.

And that gives me a lot of energy and I’m actually kind of living a stretch of my life that I don’t know that I had vision for. My husband and I went out for dinner on Saturday night and he was talking that he’s like, I feel like the things that have transpired in the last two years of your life, you didn’t see, I’m like, it’s really true, I didn’t see. It’s like fun. I just feel, I think peaceful in the growth. I feel grateful for the quality of people that are around me.

Reid Morris: Joe, how was your conversation with Tiffany?

Joe Mills: I thought it went really well. You know, we didn’t go sequentially, which is good, cuz it’s not boring. The biggest thing that I had in my head, when I was prepping for that conversation, as we were talking about it, it was this sequential. I grew myself. Then I grew people close to me and then I grew the community and it did not really work like that. It’s actually much more of this circle effect where Tiffany used, the analogy of agriculture is put in the ground, put the seeds down, they grow, you harvest them.

You do it again. You do it again. You do it again. That doesn’t end and doesn’t stop and you don’t not plant again. And so, as I think about it, versus it being a straight line, I actually see it more of like Tiffany grows to this level that allows her to give others a certain amount of knowledge, gifts, opportunities, skill sets, it bleeds into the whole bubble.

And the bubble’s this size, and then she’s able to go and expand because other people are doing what she was doing before level herself up again, do it all over again, bigger bubble level herself up again, do it all over again, bigger bubble. And so it’s actually this seasonality of focus on myself, bleed it into others by being around them and interacting with them and teaching.

And then do that again and again and again and again. And whether that season of focus on self takes two months, 20 months, 20 years. Doesn’t really matter. It just is cyclical in nature. That was one of the big things I learned.

Reid Morris: Yeah. I mean, it’s almost this environment where as you choose growth and you choose these bigger and bigger goals, presumably not everybody here had the vision in their head of where they’re at today or where they wanna be in five years.

Right? So as you uncover these motivations, uncover these next goals, you’re sort of forced to go and revisit yourself because the work you had done before. Might have been adequate enough to get you to where you are today, but as you set bigger goals, we are probably gonna to go back and revisit because there’s new demands and new requirements to get there.

Joe Mills:  She meant something at the end that I really wanna pull on now, which was a lot of the things that I’m realizing now I didn’t necessarily have vision for two years ago. And so it’s not that it’s, that’s like I’m going to go achieve that thing. At least for her in her, like conscious mind, but it’s, you almost can’t help, but move on to the next level.

If you have created people who are pushing you out of the level that you’re at. I think there’s something there to learn from and talk about with others as well, where she brought up the example of Sarah getting promoted to VP of finance and well, at one point, Tiffany was doing financial work and then we’ve had a couple people in that seat periodically.

But if she didn’t have somebody who had grown into that role, she would have to focus her time, attention and efforts inside of that space and thereby limiting the amount of time she could focus on something else. And so this idea of you will push your ceiling farther as well, if people are pushing you out of the things that you have to do today.

Reid Morris: Yep. And you think about that and people across the organization, right? All the other leaders, not only if we’re talking about the executive level. Yeah. But the people that lead these individual departments. They are having to then help more junior talent come up and that’s not just here, that’s everywhere, right?

To be able to grow. You need those people beneath you, pushing you. And I feel like that speaks to two things. One there’s the people who create that environment, like Tiffany, of people who have that shared growth mindset, but also you can create environment, but people have to have that growth mindset still within them to have the ability to elevate those, to achieve their next level of growth.

So that’s another part of that cycle, right? Is it’s not natural for everybody to do that. And that’s fine. But if you want to be in a position where you are being forced up to that next level, by the people around you, they have to have that in them themselves.

Joe Mills:  And I actually think it’s much more rewarding to be pushed there than it is to have to go find your own next level, or like constantly be this tug of war between like, I need to do the things I’m still doing and I want to get better.

And I feel forward progress as this Tiffany uses the term like this sense of peace. When I’m pushing on the edge. If you aren’t building people, your ability to find peace on the edge does not exist. So I think it’d be interesting too, to get someone who’s had that experience of like moving someone out of the role or pushing them forward so that whoever that is that’s pushing them out is taking on more and more responsibility.

How does that feel from that side? There was a lot of good stuff that we uncovered in that conversation.

Reid Morris: So as you think about the natural next step to go to, to speak to somebody in that sphere of element three and what growth means to them, would you say it’s a fair point that Darren’s probably an excellent person to sort of go and have that next step, that next conversation.

Joe Mills: Yeah, I think so. Largely because Darren was here in the middle of one of Tiffany’s cycles, if you will. So I would’ve said along that progression line now in the middle of one of those cycles. Where he was creating a culture of strong creativity inside of our four walls and his background also at big co with a publicists.

So hearing his choice to choose growth at a small agency at the time and his choice to move from that world to this world. And what was that experience like? And also, how did you land in there in the first place? And what’s your background? Getting that and understanding what he experienced through all the rotations of Element Three cause Darren’s been here for going on, I think it’s a decade this year.

So he’s been around for about half of the lifetime of the company, just experiencing what did you see, feel, have to choose to do what were inflection points for. You would be the right person to go to. Sounds like a plan.

Reid Morris: Let’s do it. Cool.