Joe Mello Part II: Inside Secrets on People Selection and Development

Join Foster Mobley in an exceptional second conversation with Joe Mello, renowned leadership architect behind DaVita’s transformation. In this deep dive, Joe unpacks the essence of authentic leadership. From honing decision-making and discernment to creating ‘leadership bandwidth’ by empowering others, Joe shares actionable insights on asking the right questions and fostering genuine growth within teams. Foster and Joe also explore purpose, core values, and the art of meaningful alignment. Tune in to discover transformative leadership principles that foster high-impact, resilient organizations.

In this episode you will find:

• the importance of metrics for everything
• the difference between a "talk to" and a "talk with" agenda
• learning how to separate judgments and facts

Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.

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Transcript

00;00;08;26 - 00;00;32;29

Foster Mobley

Welcome back to stepwise. And welcome back to another juicy conversation with Joe Melo, one of the architects behind the miracle of DaVita. And one of the best developers of leadership talent I've known in my lifetime. This is an unprecedented episode, as I haven't done two sessions with one leader before. Joe. I just found his deep insights about a leader's thinking.

00;00;33;01 - 00;00;59;25

Foster Mobley

Some pivotal frames and skills required for exceptional leadership, and how important discernment and decisions are. That I just had to have him back. This is for a deeper dive with Joe Mello. Hey Joe, thanks for hanging out with me again. I was left with some really intriguing questions last time and really would love you to share more. One of the areas that I want to get into is really where we started last time.

00;00;59;28 - 00;01;24;16

Foster Mobley

You described it as your superpower. And you said your superpower is getting to the essence of complex problems. You have the ability to call them down into things that allow you to measure them, see progress on course, correct, and fix. And then you say, I would say it's a unique set of problem solving skills that are teachable. Do tell what are they and how do you teach that stuff?

00;01;24;19 - 00;01;49;28

Joe Mello

When I say that these things are teachable, it to me falls into a couple of different things. And the teachable part of it is getting leaders to stop solving that, I think, ends up being the essence of what allows you to understand and to get to the core of an issue, and in staying more in inquiry in those situations, because leaders, while tenure end up in in situations where they're trying to solve, solve, soft solved.

00;01;49;28 - 00;01;51;25

Foster Mobley

And what's wrong with that? Joe?

00;01;51;27 - 00;02;11;08

Joe Mello

Sometimes there's nothing wrong with it, because sometimes they could be the best people to solve. And if you if you keep doing that, you've lost the ability to do something that I've been talking about with a couple of the CEOs that I work with a bunch and, and it's called leader leadership bandwidth. One of the biggest jobs of a leader is to create new leaders.

00;02;11;11 - 00;02;35;21

Joe Mello

And the consequence of creating new leaders gives you, as a leader, bandwidth, right. So you have to get involved in many fewer things. You can work at kind of your highest level of gaming, a lot of things. Instead of having to be relatively rudimentary and helping people try to get through issues and problems. And so and so, how do you get people to create better bandwidth for them as a leader?

00;02;35;22 - 00;02;37;28

Joe Mello

It's a service to teach them how to ask questions.

00;02;38;05 - 00;02;42;21

Foster Mobley

You would think that that would just be inherently something that we know how to do.

00;02;42;24 - 00;03;07;09

Joe Mello

Yeah. And it's not and and it's really funny because you're right. It's one of those things that you can't imagine somebody having to be taught how to ask a good question. You know, a friend of ours who always tried cat theory, who always says a question well asked is have answered. And it's a very powerful thing when you dig through the components of that statement.

00;03;07;09 - 00;03;31;23

Joe Mello

And it's true. And so if you can get to the right questions and have persistence in getting to the right questions instead of going to solve too early, then you accomplish two things. One is you get way more to the root of what's really happening. And then two, you're teaching somebody that they didn't get to the root of what's happening early enough on their own.

00;03;31;26 - 00;03;55;10

Foster Mobley

I'm really struck by this gap between the question asking skill of the really good ones and the average, you know, the people that do it really well, that's a really honed skill, finely honed skill. Again, I get back to like, why don't more people have it? Is it as you described in the last time we spoke, is it just ego?

00;03;55;13 - 00;04;15;18

Joe Mello

Yeah, I also think it's time. It's just not efficient. And you, you end up in a situation where you're continually saying, oh God, I know I sort of know what the answer to this is, but I got to help this person try to get to the answer themselves. So it's going to take me twice as long. This meeting is going to drag on for an hour, and we could get it done in 15 minutes.

00;04;15;19 - 00;04;43;00

Joe Mello

And so part of that to me, when I hear that complaint of people I've worked with and, and are working with, part of that to me is you're not identifying your your job correctly, because if you identify your job as being the answer man, then yeah, you're right. You do it more efficiently. But if your job is to create leaders and to help people think through things and to teach them the skills they need to to move on and to give you leadership, bandwidth, then this is a great return on time.

00;04;43;02 - 00;05;07;00

Foster Mobley

I'm struck by a conversation I had actually today I was doing a 360 interview on a fairly new leader, but and smartest guy in the room problem solver. Bandwidth is way too narrow. He's the guy he comes in, solves all the problems, blows people away, doesn't have emotional grasp or depth or grounding. And I spoke with him last week.

00;05;07;03 - 00;05;08;18

Foster Mobley

And.

00;05;08;20 - 00;05;09;22

Joe Mello

He.

00;05;09;25 - 00;05;20;13

Foster Mobley

Thinks that's his job. He's got one metric, which is the investment return. And if he doesn't make the decision, then they're losing the smartest guy in the room. What do you say to a guy like that?

00;05;20;15 - 00;05;41;21

Joe Mello

Well, after you say you can't work for me, then you say so. How is that contributing to the success of the organization? It's difficult to get them to slow down enough, or to think that other people could have a qualified opinion that didn't go to the same schools they went to, and haven't seen the breadth and depth of the company that they've seen and all that other stuff.

00;05;41;26 - 00;05;50;23

Joe Mello

They're they're literally taking the knees out of those leaders that they're, that they're working with. They've they've missed an opportunity to help the leaders come up with the answers they need to run the business.

00;05;50;26 - 00;06;12;11

Foster Mobley

And it's interesting, the conversation and the metric then shifts oddly, and I think incorrectly, to the Herculean efforts that these guys make. Wow, this guy works so hard. He works 24 seven. What a stud. And like, wait a minute. Whole different calculus.

00;06;12;14 - 00;06;24;13

Joe Mello

Yeah it is. And and and again there this is a the other challenge with the, the duration and the timetable that most investors have.

00;06;24;15 - 00;06;59;06

Foster Mobley

You guys have been the exemplar and you know, kind of core value alignment. I'm interested. I'm always interested in that. You know, that I'm also interested in, alignment around other things as well. Maybe it's operating principles. You talked about operating discipline, goals, how those change as environmental circle. I'd love you just to kind of riff on what I think is a super power that I think you're too humble dimension, which is this notion about how you get everybody aligned.

00;06;59;08 - 00;07;11;18

Foster Mobley

And there's not a lot of variation. I don't mean that in a bad way at all, but a variation around principles. But talk about alignment and how you pull that off in a very big, complex organization.

00;07;11;21 - 00;07;23;17

Joe Mello

That's a very powerful question, because it's a little amorphous to me. Even how that happens. The value stuff can be a double edged sword because leaders would use the values to hide behind tough decisions.

00;07;23;19 - 00;07;37;03

Foster Mobley

I saw that back in the day at the Sisters of Saint Joseph, where people would get the labels, and they really didn't understand them deeply necessarily, but they would use those to justify all of their bad decisions.

00;07;37;06 - 00;08;06;16

Joe Mello

We face that head on, and I'm going to say it was by accident where when we started to do kind of no holds barred town halls starting with us as senior leaders and then creating a very fundamental expectation of the people who reported to us and the people reported to them to do the exact same thing. And we would we would go to a lot of them, even when we weren't like at the front of the room in the town hall, and we would see how our leaders responded because they provided these coaching opportunities that were awesome.

00;08;06;16 - 00;08;26;29

Joe Mello

And so if you're effective at coaching, the people that report to you, and then you create expectations that they coach the people that report to them about how to answer a tricky question about how to how to answer the whole how can you say that you live by these values when you laid off 20% of our team? Yeah.

00;08;27;01 - 00;08;29;13

Joe Mello

Oh, that's a hard question.

00;08;29;15 - 00;09;03;07

Foster Mobley

That's a hard question for anybody at any time. Now, Joe, you said you kind of got into that by accident. And I do know in working with you in those years that it was a fair amount of time after you and Kent and Yoda started the culture movement in Phoenix and Academy and all of those deep DVD university, before you brought the vice presidents into a room in the Hilton meeting to really have these kind of deep conversations, what had to happen?

00;09;03;09 - 00;09;06;19

Foster Mobley

What did you need to see before you went? You know, it's time.

00;09;06;19 - 00;09;30;27

Joe Mello

We had to create upward pressure from, you know, 2 to 3 skip levels of management. And the way to do that is to, first of all, have access to senior management by that level. And we focus on the facility administrator. I think that's in no matter what kind of organization you're running, what you have to get to is the people that touch the customers most directly, or the people that manage the people that touch the customers most directly.

00;09;30;28 - 00;09;59;25

Joe Mello

And for us, that was the facility administrators there on these little islands. They've got relatively small teams. They've got complicated issues and really sick people. And so let them get to know who we are as leaders, get them to get confidence and start building confidence. And as you know, we put to get the first divvy, a university curriculum was focused on them to help them become more effective and maybe more more importantly, to help them understand if it's a job they really wanted.

00;09;59;28 - 00;10;02;14

Joe Mello

You know, that was a powerful part of that.

00;10;02;17 - 00;10;18;17

Foster Mobley

I think if it's a cultural norm and you you model that they can get it. Is there anything beyond how you structure your time with your directs that demonstrates that that can be used to accelerate one's learning about it?

00;10;18;20 - 00;10;43;16

Joe Mello

There are 2 or 3 things that worked really well for me in that situation, and that's one is getting my team together without, a talk to agenda. And when I say talk to agenda, you go to most meetings with leaders. They do one of two things. They either talk to their teams or they have 2 or 3 people talk to their team so that they don't have to prepare, and then they talk to their teams afterwards.

00;10;43;21 - 00;11;07;17

Joe Mello

And if you don't have a talk to agenda, then it's by its nature, it's going to be a conversation where parties are involved and and that's where it starts. So instead of saying, here's what I'm thinking about, you maybe start by saying so if you were going to a double in size in the next five years, what are the let's just kind of brainstorm, what are the 5 or 6 levers that we'd have to pull to make that happen?

00;11;07;18 - 00;11;30;00

Joe Mello

And you don't participate. You end up playing facilitator and just keep going and let them kind of craft the model. Instead of them expecting you to craft the model, you're going to learn a lot about people to you and talk about your team. Yeah. So and you'll I'll guarantee you we're back to our earlier conversation. You're going to get to a better answer.

00;11;30;02 - 00;11;47;23

Foster Mobley

Well, it's interesting to again, back on the premise that not everybody can hang in that environment, but also something I know about you that says if we have to fire somebody, it's a hiring error. It's nothing they did wrong. We need to treat them with full respect. Have you had a situation where you got somebody in there and you just realized they couldn't hang like that, that that was not there?

00;11;47;28 - 00;11;50;07

Foster Mobley

What do you see? And how do you how do you handle that?

00;11;50;11 - 00;12;19;22

Joe Mello

I had kind of AA3 meeting rule. If so, the first meeting and I would take it as a maybe they just run a bender the night before. It didn't feel good, didn't participate again. So give them a free pass then. Then the second time, if if you see some of the same behaviors, what I'd most often do is find somebody else on the team who I'd worked with, who was pretty good, and I and I could trust just say, hey, would you work with Sally and see if she says everything's okay with her?

00;12;19;22 - 00;12;40;28

Joe Mello

And and then if those two don't show some improvement in the third meeting, then I'll probably say, okay, Sally, we need to sit down and talk. And here are my observations. I'm not going to judge them. They are going to be observations. I'm not going to say you don't listen to people and you don't respect people. I'm going to say there were 2 or 3 times where you interrupted people during the meeting.

00;12;41;01 - 00;12;52;06

Joe Mello

How does that feel to you when somebody interrupts you? People still be on their defensive, of course, but they're going to have to face they're going to have to answer to their behaviors, not to my observation of their behaviors.

00;12;52;06 - 00;13;22;23

Foster Mobley

And is such a great and different way of handling situation. And it's predicated on this. Also under utilized, I think, skill of being able to separate one's judgments from one's facts. I have a friend, Eric, being who I interviewed on this, and he calls them capital T truths versus lowercase d truths. And the capital T truths are the facts, lowercase t truths of the judgments and opinions we make about them.

00;13;22;25 - 00;13;31;17

Foster Mobley

And I noticed that there aren't a lot of leaders that really deal in facts. Well, that slow down enough to be able to not let them get conflated.

00;13;31;23 - 00;13;49;12

Joe Mello

That construct works very well for me. The judgment versus fact thing and I've even come it at times where I've caught myself doing it because I could love to do it. I love to judge people, and it's a great, smart. And I've had to realize that, particularly if my temper gets short, it's a place I go to very easily.

00;13;49;12 - 00;14;02;15

Joe Mello

And so I have one of the self corrections I've used rather is saying, listen, that's my total judgment. And I don't have any right judging you around that. So I acknowledge it's my judgment. Here are the behaviors that got me to that judgment.

00;14;02;17 - 00;14;28;15

Foster Mobley

Joe, you you're raising something here that again, I think is a is got to be a core competence in a new leader skill set, which is this notion about openly and unhesitatingly giving clean feedback to others. You know, people have been talking about that for a long time, and you're a real practitioner in it. I mean, you have not hesitated to be candid with people about things that would help them.

00;14;28;15 - 00;14;30;28

Foster Mobley

What allows you to be successful doing that?

00;14;31;01 - 00;14;55;01

Joe Mello

I've had I've had good role models, for one thing, that people who are very willing to do that for me, it really helped me grow and it helped me become better at what I do. And that nine times, maybe 99 times out of 100 there, right? Which is unfortunate, but you I, I just think that so so I had good role models that really helped me.

00;14;55;01 - 00;15;22;10

Foster Mobley

Some say that that is, really challenging with Gen Z workers because they don't like feedback. I think that may be an over generalization, but I worry that not every, you know, to receive feedback is an act of maturity. It's hard to it's hard it's hard to expect that all of our workforce is going to be mature enough to be able to handle that.

00;15;22;12 - 00;15;28;18

Foster Mobley

Is that something you just develop over time and call out the people that are not able to hang with that?

00;15;28;20 - 00;15;48;17

Joe Mello

I think like so many things, that's a over generalization of the generation. And so you get to choose who you work with. And so if you see people that are can't take the feedback, they probably aren't in the right spot. Maybe there's another role for them in the organization, but at the end of the day, they're probably not in the right spot.

00;15;48;22 - 00;16;21;05

Foster Mobley

But I think you're right. I do think, you know, look, the the ability to change and adapt to changing circumstances quickly and well requires a free flow of information. It's like capitalism in its purest form. It requires full information and a full flow of information to work well, same way with our workforces. If we're going to adapt to the many changes coming down the pike, we have to flow information quickly and some of it's going to be a each of us, and we need to figure out what we have to do to be comfortable in that environment.

00;16;21;05 - 00;16;47;27

Joe Mello

One thing that strikes me as you're just saying that, foster, that I think is important, is that in 1980, when I graduated from college, the kind of people in the workforce were way different than in 1994, when I had my first chief operating officer role. Then in 2000, when I went to DaVita. It's not like this is such a new, you know, thing that people are different than they were in the past.

00;16;47;29 - 00;16;52;05

Joe Mello

And so, and so I think good leaders adapt to that, too.

00;16;52;07 - 00;17;05;13

Foster Mobley

And you made the point last time, like, change has been part of the health care landscape. Like get over it like we can we can worry about or we can cry about it. But it's part of what this industry has been faced with for a long time. Yeah.

00;17;05;13 - 00;17;22;25

Joe Mello

I mean, I think this is a really fascinating topic because I think I would be really paying attention to which leaders that were 2 or 3 levels below me do a good job at this.

00;17;22;28 - 00;17;47;09

Joe Mello

Because, you know, there are some people who can connect with that generation, see stuff way differently because either they're closer to it or they've adapted different. I be paying a lot of attention to that of of, you know, and then and then I'd be then I'd be sitting down and saying, you know, Julie, what do you what do you you really connect awesomely with your teams.

00;17;47;15 - 00;17;57;11

Joe Mello

What do you how do you do that? What do you find? What resonates for them? See what you could generalize so that you could coach others better around it.

00;17;57;14 - 00;18;19;25

Foster Mobley

Yeah, that learning stuff requires it from us as well, but we have to stay on that on that edge. I'd love to shift gears with you, if you don't mind. Sure. I I'm intrigued by your, attraction to. And I haven't read it yet, your attraction to Michael Easter's book Scarcity Brain. And I'd love to learn. I get to do these interviews and learn from people.

00;18;19;29 - 00;18;45;23

Foster Mobley

I haven't picked it up. It's sitting right over here. By the way, I'm reading David Brooks latest one, like How to Know a Person, which is so good is Michael Easton wrote a book called Scarcity Brain, and I know that there are a lot of things in there that attracted you or got your interest. Tell me what I need to know about scarcity, your brain, and how that might affect, you know, for living in this in this planet right now.

00;18;45;25 - 00;19;08;02

Joe Mello

This whole scarcity loop he talks about is, you know, immediate gratification and chance of something good happening and high repeatability. And so Michael Eisner takes you through a whole bunch of that, which is just, you know, how is it, how is it impacting how we deal with people, how people deal with each other, the transactional nature of things versus the relational pieces of it.

00;19;08;04 - 00;19;32;29

Joe Mello

And then toward the end of the book, he he really flips to to life, meaning and to what's what are the implications for life? Meaning, meaning. And how do you slow yourself down? And what is spirituality mean to you in that religious spirituality of a true spirituality. And so it's really that so it just brought up a whole bunch of questions for me personally about it.

00;19;33;02 - 00;19;42;01

Joe Mello

What what's wrong? It's my true belief system. And and it's got to me, one of the things I'm working on now is creating a manifest personal manifesto.

00;19;42;04 - 00;19;46;17

Foster Mobley

And say more about that, because I know you've mentioned that phrase before, but I don't fully appreciate all that's.

00;19;46;17 - 00;19;54;05

Joe Mello

Involved. Yeah. So it's what are the beliefs and what are the beliefs and values that you have, the drive your behaviors.

00;19;54;08 - 00;20;14;10

Foster Mobley

And you know, it's funny, Joe, we've been talking about that stuff for a long time. You know, the human development movement started in the 60s. And I think whether they directly refer to spirit or soul or any of that stuff, they all had some sort of nod to it, had a wonderful chat with Bill George a week ago, and it was wonderful.

00;20;14;10 - 00;20;37;20

Foster Mobley

And I, of course, read many of his books prior to the interview. And again, unabashedly, you know, it's all about purpose and soul and meaning and snapping to values and all that. So we've been talking about this for a long time. Is this just a new renaissance, given all the tumult? Like, I wonder why so many books that we're attracted to have that is the core for me.

00;20;37;20 - 00;20;58;19

Joe Mello

It's a little bit about, okay, if I'm in my last, I'm in the fourth quarter of my game, right. My life game right. I play a good fourth quarter and so that's what I'm trying to figure out, not try to fix the stuff from the past. The past is the past. Today is the first day.

00;20;58;22 - 00;21;27;04

Foster Mobley

Well, I'm, I'm on that journey with you, brother, and, happy to do whatever I can. I'm involved in the same thing I. And I honestly, I'd say five years ago, I was ready to walk off the court in the middle of the fourth quarter, just feeling like my the momentum of my life had taken me in a certain direction and wasn't even thinking about how I shape it to win the fourth quarter, to really have that kind of thing in a very different headspace now.

00;21;27;12 - 00;21;38;18

Foster Mobley

Well, Joe, this is our time. I, I appreciate you, I value love you and, every time I can exchange some ideas with you, it's just such a thrill.

00;21;38;20 - 00;21;58;20

Joe Mello

This is great. And it's so funny how this works, because I found out after the last time and this time to it. Yeah, it's actually creating more, has for me about things, and it's sharpening my clarity around how I could be a better coach to others as well. In this whole thing. So it's high value for me.

00;21;58;23 - 00;22;26;13

Foster Mobley

I still live by the principle that no man can help another without helping himself and learn that when I was, in YMCA in the fifth grade, and, I've held it with me ever. For a deeper exploration of your own journey, you can find tools, stories, and reflection questions in my book Leadership Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading, or by following me on Social media.

00;22;26;16 - 00;22;33;05

Foster Mobley

I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram as Foster Mobley. Until next time, step wise.

00;22;33;07 - 00;23;02;15

Jana Devan

Thank you for listening to Step Wise. Step Wise is brought to you by Doctor Foster Mobley, edited and promoted by Zettist. You can listen to more episodes wherever you stream podcasts. Find out more at Foster Mobley mt.com, or follow us on social media at Foster Mobley. That's f-o-s-t-e-r–m-o-b-l-e-y  we look forward to having an inspiring conversation with you soon.