Reputation Resilience with Bill Coletti

Bill Coletti is a crisis communications and reputation management expert with more than 25 years experience in managing high state crises. He's also the author of Critical Moment: The New Mindset of Reputation Management. You can learn these great hacks and ideas from Bill:

• His ABC model – rule No 1 in a crisis
• Why the key differentiator between a good and a great crisis response is speed.
• The 4 A’s of reputation resilience
• How a company owns its brand, but the public owns its reputation.

 

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

Find out more about Bill Coletti below:

Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billcoletti/

Bill on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bcoletti

Kith Website: https://kith.co

Bill’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Moments-Mindset-Reputation-Management-ebook/dp/B0757WXH8Z/

 

Full Transcript Below

 

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Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.

Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.

Bill Coletti is a special guest on today's show. He's a crisis communications and reputation management expert with more than 25 years’ experience in managing highly state crises. He's also the author of Critical Moment: The New Mindset of Reputation Management. But before we get a chance to speak with Bill, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

 

The Leadership Hacker News

 

Steve Rush: Zoom office parties employers resorted to during the pandemic are no longer fit for purpose; end neither are the in-person team building exercises at work that took place before the pandemic, according to research from the University of Sydney in Australia. In a new paper, the University updates its study, originally released in 2009, which argues it's more important for leaders to focus on team building efforts on relationships with the parties are not very close versus those that are already close and to bring them closer still. In a statement, lead researcher Dr. Petr Mattus said, “Almost every day at work, workers are subjected to interventions that are implicitly or explicitly designed to change our networks of working relationships. Teams are formed, merged, restructured and staff reallocated office spaces when they're redesigned. And we expected to participate in drinks after work in team building sessions readily. All this work with the aim of improving workplace effectiveness, efficiency, collaboration, and cohesion, but does any of this really work?” Within the research, his colleague associate professor Julian Polack points out, “Among the participants that we interviewed. Some were really against team building exercises because they felt they were implicit or compulsory, and didn't welcome the management's interest in their lives beyond their direct work performance. We found that many people don't want to be forced into having or making friends or drinks, especially on top of their busy lives. And of course, many are already introverted and this just does not work.” Polack notes, “These activities often feel mandatory. People feel that management is being too noisy or trying to control their lives too much.”

When it comes to team building on Zoom and any other online or virtual experience, some research completed by The Institute of Leadership & Management by Jay Luddit said, “We learned from the changing environment inflicted by the pandemic, that there is no one size that fits all. Employers offering flexibility around home working together with long hours, alongside other people's commitments. And finding unsurprisingly, people found initial favor with social interactions, but as time's gone, I started to really push against it.”

Socializing works best when organic and when it's voluntary. So, allow people to choose when they engage and in doing so, you'll naturally be more fulfilling around creating a team environment. So, the leadership lens here is, how much time do we really spend understanding the internalization and the behaviors of our teams so that we can create the appropriate opportunity for socializing and networking. And I wonder if you just took a look around your team and the people that you work alongside now, how many of those Zoom pub quizzes and drink sessions are still going on today? I suspect there are a lot fewer than there were six months ago and therefore, what could be the next way that we gather in a virtual world to celebrate? That's been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, information, please get in touch.

Start of Podcast

 

Steve Rush: Joining me on today's show is Bill Coletti. Bill is the CEO of Kit.co, he's the bestselling author of, Critical Moments: The New Mindset of Reputation Management, he's a C-suite advisor and a strategist. Bill welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Bill Coletti: Steve, I'm really excited to be here and looking forward to a great conversation.

Steve Rush: Me too, before we get into that conversation, though, it might be really helpful for our listeners to just get a sense of, who you are? How you've arrived at running Kit?

Bill Coletti: That's awesome. So, I started my career, and so what we do is, we do crisis communications and reputation management for corporations and leaders. And I've started my career in politics. I ran political campaigns, did my first local government race, State Senate race when I was a senior in high school and then continue to be involved in politics through college, and then graduated on doing statewide campaigns and progressively larger races, and then took a five-year break and went to Eastern Europe and lived in Bulgaria again, doing politics and in Romania and Albania and a little bit in Bulgaria area and then came home in 2000 back to the United States and ran the United States Senate Campaign. And so, taking the skillsets of politics, which is as you know, in politics, it's very much crisis management. You're just trying to create one more crisis for the other guys that you have yourselves, or you're often trying to solve crises or fixed problems in a campaign is when we did that and applied those skillsets to a corporate context. And so, since around 2000, I've been doing this in a corporate context of working with corporations as they find themselves, their strategy misaligned with public's expectation. So that's where we spend all of our time now.

Steve Rush: So, I guess politics was an incredible foundation for you to get those skills that not only understanding and responded to crisis, but as you rightly said, creating crisis for your opponents, what was maybe the one kind of stand out moment for you in your political career, where you could say right, that's definitely going to work in corporate world?

Bill Coletti: You know, I think it is understanding attention span, understanding what motivates people and really understanding the limitations of your side. And so, I think great campaigns really understand who they are and what they stand for. Great candidates understand who they are and what they stand for. And what we've seen with corporations is that there's a key differentiator in crisis response between good and great. And good and great, the difference is speed, but the way you get fast is by understanding your mission and values, understanding what you stand for, and then there's elements of chain of command, so those two things equal speed. And so, what we've found with candidates is those that knew what they stood for didn't live in the middle of the road, took a position. They did better than candidates that tried to be all things to all people. And that's similar in a corporate context, not exactly universal, but similar in a corporate context. There are some differences that we can unpack if you want to talk about. But I think the biggest thing is, knowing who you are? What you stand for?  Can you actually walk the walk and not just talk it?

Steve Rush: Yeah, neat. And I guess the whole 12 months that we've been in so far, it has been a crisis for most organizations. What has the pandemic bought about for you to deal with in the work that you now do with Kith?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, so to two key insights, one is ABC, always be communicating. Companies, it's not an epiphany, but I think it became much more understandable and relatable that companies always have to be communicating in particular to their employees. And that's the second key insight that we picked up in this whole COVID experience is, that leaders, whether it be the CEO or a departmental leader or political leader. They have to be a source of truth because there are so many different sources of truth around COVID-19 is, that the leader of your company has to be a communicator and they have to drive that first insight of always be communicating. So, ABC, always be communicating. And then the second part is that leaders, CEOs, the business leaders have to be the primary spokesperson communicating what the path forward is and trying to be a source of truth.

Steve Rush: It's definitely not the time for abdication at this point, is it?

Bill Coletti: Not at all now, now is the time. And that's been a real epiphany. A lot of companies say, well, this reputation stuff, I don't really need to do that. I just serve my customer, serve my employees. But the public's expectations, running in parallel with COVID. In the United States and across globally, there are these issues related to social justice. These issues related to, or populations, groups of people are demanding corporations to take a stand. Those two things, COVID and social justice, public expectation have collided. So, there's no room for application. Even if there a small B2B lumber company. You have to have a position because your customers and then your customers, customers really demand you to have a position.

Steve Rush: I love the notion by the way of ABC. always be communicating. And I totally get that. And it's something that's been really core to my heart, but I just wondered from your perspective, is there a danger in a crisis that's been, as long as the pandemic has been, that you can over-communicate?

Bill Coletti: So, there's the possibility of that. I think it's a really, really high bar.

Steve Rush: Yeah, right.

Bill Coletti: I think it has to do with tone as much as volume of how much of it that you do. I think one of the great struggles that our clients have and that we have to work with them on one is, well, I've already said that, why do I need to say it again? Or I don't know when this is going to be over? And I don't know when we're going to be back in the office? I don't know when we're going to have a vaccination? Or I don’t know what the government's going to do next? Is getting comfortable with uncertainty. That's been a great challenge for companies to figure out and for individual leaders, you know, (A) I've already told everybody that can be, I don't know what I'm going to tell them. It's okay. It is okay to say we don't know, but our best judgment or our best, here's what we're thinking about. That's really, really good enough to be able to communicate in that philosophy of always.

Steve Rush: It's filling the gaps that people have the problem with. If they understand that you genuinely don't know what your strategy is, or you genuinely don't know what your next steps are, that's easy to deal with than them perceiving that you have got insight where you're just holding it back, right?

Bill Coletti: Absolutely, and so back to that point, I made about the key differentiator between good and great crisis response is speed. The reason you're in the race, the reason that you need speed is you've got to fill the vacuum. If you don't fill the vacuum, somebody will fill it for you. Someone will tell your story for you, whether that be, you know, customer service rep, that's upset and tells it to somebody on the phone or internally at standing at the water cooler or on a Zoom call with your colleagues. Someone will tell that story if you don't fill in that breach. And so, you have to be conscious of that. The best remedy is always be communicating. I think the bar to your previous question is really high, but you can do that too much.

Steve Rush: Awesome. Now you've written a best-selling book, Critical Moments: The New Mindset of Reputation Management. What was the inspiration for that?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, it's a neat story.  I was in New York with a client, a remarkably talented female CEO and she had hired us and we were engaged in this crisis challenge. And it was about ultimately determined to be about a 7 to 10-day challenge, kind of where they were in the headlines, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Related to some operational challenges that they had. It was this slow burn, slowly unfolding challenge. During the course of the conversation, she and I had developed a friendship and a very consultative relationship. And I kept talking about this notion of reputation and reputation management, her focus, rightly so, and my focus was on the crisis. The moment, how do we get ourselves back to normal? Back to our position that we were before all the reporters started calling us? But I transitioned the conversation to, once we get through this, we're going to need to rebuild our reputation.

And so, as an earnest consultant, I was full of jargon and full of, you know, Fluffernutter as I like to call it. And she challenged me and she said, Bill, I think I understand what you need, but I need a practical understanding of what you mean about reputation management, similar to the way I understand marketing, which is related to the four P’s of marketing. Price, product, place promotion, if you're kind of an old school marketer, you might be familiar with the four P's. Price, product, place, promotion. It's the foundational underpinning of everything we know about the modern marketing mix. And we can quibble of whether digital and social media changed that, I don't believe that it is. Those four fundamentals are incredibly durable.

So, her comment was Bill. I need to understand what you mean by reputation with a model like that. So, it was with that challenge that I flew home and on a cocktail napkin. And I said, well, what do I mean by reputation management? Fortunately, I had a three-hour flight. And then that let me build out what ultimately became the four A's of reputation management. And it sort of begins with this notion of awareness, goes to assessment, authority, and then ultimately action. And what the marketing mixes it, the four P's did for corporations, is it allowed leaders to assign responsibility and budget to four distinct disciplines. Price, product placement promotion, the four A's does the same thing when it comes to reputation management. It creates an organizational framework so that leaders can actually not just do good things and hope that it impacts their reputation, but actually articulating a quantifiable budget based rational model for how to grow your reputation. So, the motivation was this remarkably challenging in a positive way, CEO. They needed me to articulate reputation in a new way, and that's what the four A's. And that's where the book ultimately came from.

Steve Rush: It's a really neat fit because marketing and reputation have very closely aligned, aren’t they? What's your kind of take on how aligned they are?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, it's interesting. I use the terminology. That a company owns its brand, but the public owns its reputation.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Bill Coletti: And so, marketing is all about the brand. It's all about protecting the brand, growing the brand, changing customer experience, changing and drawing, making yourself more attractional so that people will swipe their credit card or write a check or do a purchase order or whatever the case may be. I think that reputation is formed by, certainly customers, but there are non-customers that have a perception and reputation. So, in the United States, we've got British Petroleum, BP. And if you live in the Gulf Coast of the United States, while I may not be a customer of a BP gas station, because it's just not convenient for me, it's not on my way home or to and from the office, but I certainly have a perception about BP, that is me articulating a position and articulating a belief around their reputation.

Similar for Boeing. I am not going to be needlessly able to buy a Boeing jet engine. That's just not on our purchase list, but we have a belief and a perception around Boeing equipment because of what we've seen or heard in the media and understand that. So, brand is driven for check writers, people that are going to actually purchase it. That's the domain of marketers and I believe communications and the folks that think about reputation, that's where they live. They live in that notion of creating and growing a reputation long-term. So, I think there's a distinction because a company can control its brand, but it's the public that owns its reputation.

Steve Rush: Yeah, that's a great reframe. Love it. So, in the book you talk about the four A's of reputation and management. Might be useful just to spin through the four A’s and give our listeners a little bit of a nudge to in this (A). This is maybe what I think about?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, that's awesome. So, model of these basic four A's really critical mindset is what I'm trying to articulate. So, the first one is awareness. And so, my work is often for corporations, but it's also for individuals. And so, it fits into both a human dynamic as well as to a corporate dynamic standpoint. So, the first thing is awareness. So, who are we? What do we stand for? What is the aspiration that we have for our reputation? So, it's really around awareness and understanding of self, self-meaning in the context of a corporation. How do we understand that?

Second is assessment. Once I know who we are, and we're talking to and about ourselves, that's awareness. Assessment is to go ask others, let's go ask our stakeholders. Let's go ask, certainly our customers, let's ask our regulators, let's ask other people, our neighbors. And so, I talk about it in a context of communities, customers, and critics. So, let's actually go do assessment, which is good old fashioned survey research, or some form of public opinion research, where do we stand? Here's what we think, which is awareness. Assessing is where we actually validate that with the public. We then moved to authority and authority is the element of where you get buy in from your senior leadership team, where you're sharing the insight and that you actually have the ability to drive change, but you need to make sure that your leadership is bought in. Understands the value of reputation, understands the economics of reputation. And there's a whole lot of work that needs to be done with your leadership team. With the understanding of awareness, the understanding of assessment that leads to authority.

The cover of the book then is all portrayed as a pyramid. At the top of that third level, which is authority. There's a solid blue line, and the solid blue line is a consultant or well-intentioned employee barrier. Because the last (A) is action, is that too often companies will ping pong around and decide to be overly focused on the cause, the issue of the day, whether it be LBGTQ issues, black lives matter, all critically important topics, whether they talking about global climate change, whatever these issues are. But unless an organization is aware, done some assessment, done some authority. You can't jump to action unless you've done that work. So that's why there's a blue line. So those are the four elements. Action is actually the manifesting and doing reputational boosting efforts campaigns to actually grow your reputation for the long-term, but you can't do it just like you can't. When I lived in Bulgaria, I had a buddy of mine who was a Marine and on Thursday night, before a Saturday morning marathon, he said, wow, well, heck, I can go do that. He failed miserably and running a marathon and jumping into action because he hadn't, wasn't very, self-aware, he hadn't really assessed his body and his wife really didn't give him permission to spend any time training over the next 48 hours. So that action kind of failed

Steve Rush: I love that model on the basis that as you've already articulated. So, if you're an individual thinking about your reputation, you can apply. If you're running a team, if you're running a project or running an organization, those things still apply.

Bill Coletti: Yeah, absolutely. And that's wonderful the way you say it that way, because as a firm, that's who we serve. And so, we serve individuals with a training product, where we call KITH ACADEMY, which is all about the mindset and behavior of superior communicators, what do superior communicators do? We work with teams on simulations. How do you actually simulate these crises? How do you think about what could or couldn't happen and exercise your team? We work with the organization, which is the bigger, comprehensive transformation reputation work that we do. And then we serve, give the situation, which is crisis response, where we come running and actually do crisis response. So yeah, so the four A's are very durable in both the human context, the team context, as well as organization

Steve Rush: Now you've become renowned for helping folks get through crisis and deal within managed crisis. And I guess there've been lots of lessons to be learned from the pandemic in the last 12 months, but typically as a leader, what would be a response you would see more often from a leader in a crisis?

Bill Coletti: I think head in the sand, this will blow over. There's a very poor assessment of smoke versus fire. People misinterpreting something as smoke when it really is fire or something that's fire, but it's really just smoke. There's also this notion that, you know, that's all just a social media chatter. This is really not that important. My customers, my key stakeholders, it doesn't really matter to me. So, there's an under appreciation and then there's an over appreciation. I think the key thing of how leaders respond is a misunderstanding of this evaluation of smoke versus fire. That's the key miss that I see over and over again.

 

Steve Rush: Yeah, and if you think about, there's likely to be crisis in every organization, whether it be small- or large-scale crisis to deal with, and it's the old adage of, it's not about the crisis is how you respond, right?

Bill Coletti: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Bill Coletti: Absolutely, and I like to talk about crisis. You know, there are normal operational business challenges that impact organizations that are not crises. Those are just things we got to manage through. We just have to manage through that event. I think this notion of crisis is something that really distracts me or takes me off my strategy. Because of the public's expectation or what the public thinks I should be doing, even though they never paid attention to before but they're paying attention now. That's what a crisis is, that really sort of sets the stage for this notion when I talk about critical moments, that the real distinction that organizations need to think about is, the comings and goings and business, that's why we're all in business. We just got to keep grinding and keep doing the work that we do, but something that takes us away from our strategy and this aligns us with what the public expects us to do. That's the greater challenge.

Steve Rush: So, here's a little bit of side question for you Bill, that's kind of a sprung to my thinking, as we've been talking, is there a magic sauce to stop or prevent crisis happening in the first place?

Bill Coletti: I don't think there's one thing. I think there some pretty well-established recipes to minimize the threat. Now things happen all the time, and so you can't manage against that. I think a global pandemic is one that we would've never mitigated against. We could have prepared for it better, but we could have never mitigated. So, I don't think you can ever be bulletproof on this stuff or crisis proof, but I think it could be crisis ready. And there are three simple things that I advise to clients to do. One is simplest basic form. Is that your weekly, monthly, quarterly staff meeting, whenever you get your team together, pull out the major newspaper of your choice, national or international newspaper and say, pull out a headline and say, what if this had happened to us? What would we do? How would we respond? The simple act of being aware of response, the simple act of asking questions about, how would we respond? It's a basic form of simulation. That's one of the best things that an organization could do.

The second thing is actually invested in simulations, actually invest in training and testing and exercising your machine. How do we respond? What are our mission and values? What's the chain of command? Really exercising that with a various group of stakeholders within your organization. And then thirdly, most big sophisticated organizations have a risk management function. In most large multinational corporations. The risk management function is about what insurance do we need to buy in order to transfer risk so that we don't have to pay for an exposure that therefore we have insurance. There is great thinking that lives within the risk management organization, particularly for big global corporations and as well as most national corporations have risk managers. Leveraging the thinking of those risk managers, do simple simulations, do comprehensive simulations, but really leveraging the thinking of risk managers, those are three very concrete things that organizations can do. Again, the goal is not to become crisis proof, it's to have fewer of them, but also be more crisis ready.

Steve Rush: I guess, another way of putting it, is strategic thinking, isn't it?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, it is, in its simple form, and we need to do it. You need to do it in a thoughtful, realistic way because as you know, strategic thinking begets strategic planning and you cannot plan for every possible permutation. You need to think in a smart way, you need to use your imagination, but you got to be careful. And that's where risk management and risk planning lose credibility when you start chasing every crazy permutation. And so, what we've already experienced is everybody is writing pandemic plans. And I don't know about you. I don't know if we're going to have to deal with a pandemic. We might in three years, five years, fifty years, who knows, we might. But there is plenty of other risks that we could be thinking about.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Bill Coletti: And that's why I don't really over-index on the risk. I over index on the response. And how does an organization get ready to respond

Steve Rush: I'm with you on that one, for sure. Yeah, so this part of the show is where I get to hack into your leadership mind and thinking about all of the great teams and experiences and folks that you've worked with and led, and the first place I'd like for us to go is for me to hack into your mind and look at your top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Bill Coletti: That's great. So, I try to be really, really conscious about clarity of communication as a leader. What is my vision and how do I articulate that? And I use a tool what's called an impact filter and an impact filter is where I take the actual time. Let's say, I want to plan a webinar. I want to plan a conference or something like that. Some sort of external vision, write a next book, whatever the case may be. Is that I go through this effort of using what's called an impact filter to articulate, what are the key characteristics? What's the best thing that could happen? What's the worst thing that could happen? What does success criteria look like? And that then forces me to write it down. So, I think pen and paper is one of the best leadership acts, is write down my vision and not just sort of pop it off. Because I've got sufficient throwaway in my organization that people will listen to what I say, but when I take the time to write it down, it's a lot more clear. So that's number one, is usage of an impact filter.

 

Related to that is trying to speak clearly. And don't lead by empowerment, but lead by agreement, is that I really want folks to agree that what we're talking about or what I request or what we're doing, everyone to agree, that's the right thing to do and really focus on this notion of leadership agreement. And the last thing I do is a leadership hack for me, is being very, very intentional about protecting my own personal space and my own personal time, because as an entrepreneur and as a leader of my own firm, having time and space to think about, what we're doing? Why we're doing it? And what we're going to do next? is a really wonderful, wonderful way for me to serve my team. And then if I marry that up with clarity using these impact filters, those are three things that I do that would try to sort of help me lead the organization I run.

Steve Rush: I love those, and most entrepreneurs also suffer with that last one where they, you know, try to create that deliberate space, but often get munched between work and personal space.

Bill Coletti: Yeah, very, very sad, but true, sad, but true. We all validate ourselves by how busy, busy, busy we are.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Bill Coletti: And it's just, I've got an entrepreneur that I fly alongside of, completely different. He's in the real estate industry, but we're very close and I just watch him and it's exhausting for me simply to observe him, I have nothing to do with his business. But it is exhausting for me to observe him, and I think he could be so much stronger if he took those moments to pause.

Steve Rush: Sure. The next part of the show we affectionately call Hack to Attack. So, this is where something in your life or your work hasn't worked out particularly well. It might have been an experience that had gone completely south for you, but as a result of that experience, it's now a positive in your life or your work, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, such an amazing question. And if you don't mind, I actually feel compelled to be very personal about this.

Steve Rush: If you're comfortable with that, we're absolutely delighted.

Bill Coletti: Yeah, I went through a divorce and it was a very challenging moment and I was working at a global public relations firm and would have a big fancy title, a global practice leader, and got caught really short of not paying a lot attention to my family, not paying a lot of attention to the needs of my kids. And so that car accident, if you will, or whatever, slamming into a wall, but that moment created, really forced me to refocus on things that really mattered. And I was caught, and then it led me to this amazing, amazing relationship that I have with my wife now, Debbie, who is such an enriching treasure. So, if I had not gone through that journey, I would not as be close and connected as I was to my kids.

I would not have gone over my entrepreneurial journey. And then I wouldn't have found my wife, Debbie and fallen in love and found an appreciation in such a different way. So that's a tragedy that lots of people go through. You can choose to make something good out of it. And I'm very appreciative of all of the characters in that play. Some are villains and some are heroes, but I'm so appreciative of all the characters in that play, because it let me stand here with you to talk about an entrepreneurial journey, which is very exciting, but more importantly as a better husband and a better father.

Steve Rush: And I love the fact that you're comfortable in sharing it as well, so kudos to you for doing so, and thank you. I really appreciate that.

Bill Coletti: Thank you.

Steve Rush: And of course, any separation, any relationship breakdown, that's a crisis. And I suspect that it gave you also some additional foundations you're pulling on unconscious.

Bill Coletti: Absolutely, and I tried to be intentionally conscious about that because you're absolutely right. And it is all about, one of the key learnings from that for me is, I still had a career. I still had a job. I still have clients. I still have responsibility, you know, to my parents, which I was responsible for their caregiving at the time. I really learned to compartmentalization, and when you realize the leaders that we work with, that I work with, that find themselves in a crisis, it's typically the worst day of their professional career. And they have to be really good at compartmentalizing because they've got their own personal paranoia about, how's this going to impact them and their career? How's it going to impact their company that they lead or responsible for? And then they've got whatever's going on at home or whatever is going on, where else in their life. So, this gave me a greater appreciation for compartmentalization and a greater appreciation for the multifaceted, the components of crisis that organizations need to go through.

Steve Rush: Awesome lesson. Thanks for sharing. So last thing we want to do with you is give you a chance to do a bit of time travel, bump into Bill at 21, and you to give them some advice. So, what would your advice to Bill at 21 be?

Bill Coletti: Be an entrepreneur earlier. You were very generous in sharing some of these questions in advance. So, I actually thought about this one. I just think the journey that I've been on the past six years as an entrepreneur and running my own firm has been so enriching to me. And it was something that I was conscious of in my twenties and thirties and forties of like, yeah, I don't want to do that. That's not really for me, but I would have explored it and neither my parents were overly entrepreneurial. But I think that journey for me has been the most transformational thing in my life. And it's transformed so many things positively in my life that I wish I had done it earlier.

Steve Rush: Awesome, love it.

Bill Coletti: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, folks are probably going to wonder, how do we get to understand a little bit more about what Kith do? How can I find a copy of Bill's book? Where's a good place for us to send them when we're done?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, the basic one is our website. It's just Kith. K-I-T-H.co, Kith is our corporate website, Bill Coletti on Twitter, Bill Coletti on LinkedIn. That's C-O-L-E-T-T-I. And when you get to our website, there actually be a landing page and we'll put it in the show notes. Just a quick summary of some of the things that we talked about here that people want to share. And so, we'll have a link down in the show notes, but it'll be just our website. And for the people that understand what we talked about here, and I'll be able to share that. So, I'm pretty old school. Just old fashion email off the website works, LinkedIn works. And like I said, be pretty active on Twitter.

Steve Rush: Awesome, and those show notes will be all over our social media and our website too Bill. So, we'll make sure that we help connect with people who want to spend some more time listening and working with you.

Bill Coletti: That's awesome. Thank you very much.

Steve Rush: Its thank you for me, actually, for you taking time out of your busy schedule and being with us and sharing some of your stories. It's been really lovely talking with you and thank you for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast, Bill.

Bill Coletti: Well, it is my pleasure to be here Steve. Thank you for what you do. You share tremendous content, that's so valuable to people. So, thank you very much for having me.

Steve Rush: You're very welcome. I appreciate it. Thanks Bill.

 

Closing

 

Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.

 

Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler there @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.