Achieving Work-Life Balance In Leadership With Major General (ret) Scott Clancy
Episode 160
Are you feeling the burnout of juggling leadership, team development, and personal life without dropping the ball? Do the challenges of talent management in a profit-driven world keep you up at night? Do you strive for authenticity and trust in your leadership but find vulnerability a bridge too far? Tune into the latest episode of the Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo, featuring esteemed guest Scott Clancy, and discover how to transform these struggles into your strongest assets.
As a seasoned helicopter pilot and commander with 37 years of military leadership under his belt, Scott Clancy lifts the veil on the strategies that helped him maneuver through the trenches of managing people in high-stakes environments, from the sands of Afghanistan to the corporate boardroom.
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to ...
Implement strategies that protect both your team's mental health and the organization's objectives
Engage in open, transparent communication that removes the stigma around vulnerability
Align team actions with the organizational vision
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About the Guest
Scott’s journey to leading and coaching began with being a Royal Canadian Air Cadet from the age of 14-18. This experience led him to join the Canadian Armed Forces and attend the College Militaire Royale de St Jean (CMR). He played college basketball throughout his time there. After university, he went on to obtain his pilot wings as a helicopter pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Scott served on three Tactical Helicopter Squadrons of the RCAF in various roles, including as a Tactical Instructor Pilot. He honed his operational planning skills as a lead operational planner for the 1st Canadian Air Division and as the Chief of Curriculum Development for the Canadian Army Staff College in Fort Frontenac. As the head of operations and subsequently Chief of Staff for 1 Wing in the RCAF, Scott was given the responsibility to plan and deploy helicopter forces for the war in Afghanistan, for which he earned a Meritorious Service Medal (MSM). He earned a second MSM for leading the Air Component responding in the aftermath of the tragic earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
Connect with Scott Clancy:
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About the Host:
Danielle Cobo is an international female speaker for organizations, associations, and the public sector. She works with audiences to harness the grit and resilience to lead through change.
With over 15 years of corporate experience in the medical sales industry, she knows how to build high-performing teams that increase sales, productivity, and employee retention. Her expertise includes corporate resilience and burnout prevention.
Danielle is the author of “Unstoppable Grit: Breakthrough the 7 Roadblocks Standing Between You and Achieving Your Goals” and hosts the globally top-rated podcast "Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo.”
As a former Fortune 500 Senior Sales Manager, she led her team through downsizing, restructuring, and acquisitions to become the #1 sales team in the nation. As a result, she was awarded Region Manager of the Year. Her resiliency motivated her to earn four consecutive national Sales Excellence Awards in a male-dominated industry.
While her husband, a Blackhawk pilot in the Army, deployed to Iraq for a year, Danielle learned to balance a demanding job while caring for their energetic 1.5-year-old twin boys, who possess more energy than a squirrel after a triple espresso.
Danielle’s resilience led her to start her own business, helping others develop the grit, resilience, and courage to thrive in life and business.
Her tenacious attitude stems from being raised by an ambitious mother and recovering from being taken from her father and cast out at 17 years of age.
She is a two-time 60-mile walker and a monster truck driver in Louboutin’s.
Danielle has a bachelor’s in communication with a minor in psychology from the California State University of Fullerton, Certification in Inclusive and Ethical Leadership from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business, and accreditation in Human Behavior from Personality Insights. Inc., and Leadership from Boston Breakthrough Academy.
She is a member of the National Speakers Association, the Central Florida National Speakers Association Chapter, Innovation Women, and a former member of Working Women of Tampa Bay. Danielle serves on the Military Advisory, Workforce Development, and Women of Influence Committees of the Tampa Chamber of Commerce. She is also a contributing writer for Women's Quarterly Magazine.
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Through Danielle's captivating storytelling, content-rich and motivational style, she empowers individuals and organizations to cultivate unwavering resilience, igniting a transformative path towards increased sales, productivity, employee retention, and collaboration.
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The Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo explores the journeys of people who have overcome adversity and harnessed the grit and resilience to thrive in all areas of their lives, Guests share how they overcame difficult times - the strategies, mindset shifts, lessons they learned along the way, and actions that propelled them forward. From navigating career setbacks to overcoming personal obstacles, each episode is a testament to grit and resilience.
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What if I told you the secrets to conquering life's toughest battles, hidden, and military strategies? Have you ever imagined how a high-stakes war zone can mentally transform your everyday challenges? I'm thrilled to introduce to you a guest whose extraordinary life is like something out of an action movie.
Major General Retired Scott Clancy. isn't just a military hero. He's a master of turning crisis into victories, both on the battlefield and in everyday life. From piloting helicopters in the Royal Canadian Air Force to orchestrating critical missions in Afghanistan and responding to global crisis, Scott's experiences are not just about military strategy, They're about the human spirit's capacity to rise above challenges.
In this episode, we're delving into the riveting questions, how can the tactics of a helicopter pilot under fire help you in your daily struggles, and can the principles of leading soldiers through chaos and uncertainty apply to your personal and professional life?
Navigating War Zones and Humanitarian Missions
I joined the military when I was 18. I went to our version of your academies down in the United States. We have joint academies, so it's not divided into Army, Navy, and Air Force. got my degree there, went on and become a helicopter pilot, served on three different helicopter squadrons. Now I'm a helicopter pilot.
Your husband's an army helicopter pilot. If I was in your service, I'd be in the army. We call army aviation TAC HEL, tactical helicopters. And the phrase is there's no hell like TAC HEL. And so I did that for a bunch of decades. I was responsible for planning and preparing forces to go to Afghanistan, using American Chinooks that we borrowed from you guys and leased to be able to do that operation.
And I commanded in various places, including in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. I had some experience and moved up through the ranks, was a wing commander and ultimately went to Alaska as the deputy commander of the Alaskan NORAD region, and then finished off my career as a two-star general down in Colorado Springs, where I was the director of operations for all of NORAD.
I was just working in my office on a day and we were sending forces out. The earthquake had happened the day before, so we were already preparing helicopter forces to go.
And I was on a video teleconference with my boss and the general on the other end, started speaking to me directly. Kind of looking around wondering what was going on because he said, Scott, you have to take a personal interest in this because you're now going to go, you're promoted and you're going down to Haiti and you're going to start commanding that force.
You need to leave as soon as possible. And I went home and talked to my wife and said, I'm leaving. And she said, when? And I said, well, and she wasn't my wife then. She was my fiance. So, I left. In five hours and commanded the forces in Haiti, the air forces in Haiti as part of our joint task force.
And it was pretty catastrophic. So a lot of devastation while I was down there, but, very rewarding for me and the team to be able to give back in that kind of environment and help.
I would imagine when you spend a lot of your career in war zones to be able to be put in a position where you feel like you're contributing back and rebuilding versus some of the war zones, it's like taking things down.
But when you're in Haiti, helping rebuilding will probably be a very different experience.
I think that there is really something there as we compare some of the operations that we've conducted, whether it's American or Canadian joint operations that are peacekeeping, peacemaking, or recovery operations, or even those operations where we see a very solid goal, a very solid mission, and then we can accomplish that versus those operations that are muddied.
We got involved in operations in, Rwanda and in Bosnia where the missions were not clear, where the mandates and the tools that we gave to the troops were not necessarily clear. And the incidents of mental illness on the tail end, on the back end of those operations were significantly higher. And I think there's a schism there the psyche, that has more of a problem dealing with it than it does.
What do you see on the psyche when you're seeing somebody that's coming from a different deployment or different missions that they're coming back and what are you seeing on the psyche end?
I think the most important thing about mental health and especially resilience from a military that a lot of people can learn from is when you have to prepare for this, two, everybody is susceptible and There's a role for leaders in this.
So, if I go back to those 1, 2, 3 things, start with, you have to prepare, you have to talk about it in advance. These things are going to happen. You're going to have feelings, you're going to have reactions. People are going to deal with these things to various degrees.
And it starts with inoculating people to those kinds of things because then they can develop their own resilience.
They can prepare for them mentally in their heads. They can project themselves forward as to what's going to happen. You're going to have to have frank conversations.
How people are going to feel
How they're going to react
How the organization's going to react to try and support them
Everybody has a breaking point. So once you know that in the human psyche, then the idea is that we're all in this together.
And I think military organizations and law enforcement have come to grips with removing that stigma because everybody's dealing with it on some sort of a scale more than anybody else in society.
And then the last thing is the role of leaders. Leaders are going to set the stage and have a role to set the standards and set the example, as well as provide that purpose, provide that vision, and reinforce why people are there.
And I think those things anchor people's psyche and help them. If you have a leader as well, that is going to be pragmatic so that when something happens, hey, this is okay, this is normal, you're okay, we're going to deal with you.
Survivor Guilt and Moving Forward
I want to share a particular situation, specifically on what you had applied and talked about. I was working for an organization and it was, we were going through a hostile takeover from a competitor, was trying to take over our organization, and we ended up going through layoffs where we lost 20 percent of our sales force.
My particular team lost half of my team in one day. And the uncertainty that went around that particular situation, and we're talking about the kind of three approaches that took place after that.
One was support. Supporting those who were laid off and helping them with their resume, and their LinkedIn profile, helping them get set up for success as best as I possibly could.
Support the survivors that remained who had the survivor guilt of, I'm grateful I have a job, and at the same time, the fear of, are we going to go through layoffs again? Then there's being clear about what the vision of the future is, what's going to come and why are we making these changes and providing the perspective and then something that you mentioned is preparation because it could happen again.
It could not happen again, but preparing a plan for the future is what's setting us up for success.
Creating Purposeful Leaders
Developing them means that you establish that care. It's the first thing that if I were a leader, you're going to have to demonstrate care as a primary indicator of trust.
Once you develop trust among teams. Wow, then the next thing you're going to do is you're going to take that vision and all leaders are going to develop visions. You have all sorts of love for your vision board analysis and your COBO goals for the year.
But I see a lot of people doing exactly those things, but what they don't follow through is they don't translate what that means to the people on their team. I can say I was up in Alaska and we're going to put jets up on the North slope, thousands of miles away, and they're going to intercept Russian bombers.
But what does that mean to the clerk who's working in an orderly room back in Anchorage or Fairbanks? My ability to explain why it's essential and this work and how that applies, and then walking that goal as to how they're an essential cog in that team. And that's what that means to me. And that's why I need you to be doing this.
That's important. And if you have a problem each leader in the in-between has those responsibilities. This creates resilience because people understand,
Hey, this is why I'm here. This is what they can deal with that sense of purpose anchors them and then you can explain why it's important for them perhaps to be away from their families, but then it's also about you setting that example of it's not always a hundred percent, right?
Because if I'm developing someone, I don't want them to be on all the time. They can't be around the clock every instant, 20 hours a day. So I have to set that balance for myself and I have to show them and mentor them so they can, you can see how this all blends into the same things that business leaders need to be able to develop within their teams to sustain that activity.
And then when they have to surge. They know that they can call on the people to be able to do those things. You send the military out the door, whether it's the 101st, whether it's all these great units, the special operations units that the Americans send overseas or our soft units, they're ready because they don't spend all their time at the highest of tempos.
They can't because if they do, they're going to burn themselves out. These concepts apply directly to business as well.
Absolutely, they do. you talked about providing the why, and I think that is so important to really emphasize because when we went through all of those changes, the last thing my team needed to hear at that moment was we need to hit sales targets, we need to hit our numbers, we need to hit revenue, we need to make sure that we're bringing enough revenue where we can sustain our business where this hostile takeover isn't gonna happen.
That's the last thing they needed to hear because they don't care. They just want to know, are they going to have a job? What is their future going to look like? So it's important, like you were talking about, to have a team be part of the vision and part of the plan and part of the future. How are the changes going to impact them?
How Journaling Shapes Leadership
Why and how is vulnerability so important in a leadership role?
I don't think I could verbalize what vulnerability meant, and I was a military leader, so the idea was you had to be decisive, you're going to have to be decisive in very short periods of time.
So the idea of what vulnerability meant to teams, but, it's interesting because, and I find this with a lot of military leaders or even people in the military and, ask your husband about this. We say I love you an awful lot. I say to my peers and my friends, I love you, brother. And I mean it.
I would die for you. I would risk my life even more than my country and constitution and all those other things, you serve in many instances.
Now what that means for me later on as a senior leader is I started doing, I think you have to have vulnerability. There's got to be a certain amount of self-awareness. The only advice, it's not the only advice, that's not true.
The best advice I give to young leaders is, you want to do one thing, you want to do one thing that's going to help your leadership.
Journaling about how you lead, start journaling about how you feel, start journaling about the more that you're self-aware about yourself, the more that you're willing to ask questions about whether you're doing the right thing, developing the right skills, more that you're going to be not self assure, but more confident that you can move into those situations and ask tough questions.
Critique yourself.
Be open and transparent about themselves. Funny enough, this is vulnerability. And that vulnerability, people immediately gravitate towards it. I wrote this book after I retired as a two-star general and the feedback, the biggest feedback that I've got from everybody was, wow, you're not telling us what you did, right?
All these things that you got wrong. And then we're trying to learn from it. And he goes, And people say, that's what attracts us to this. That's what catches our eye. That's what's very interesting because I can see it more. That's why I think vulnerability is so essential. It connects people because it's authentic.
By being vulnerable that way, by being willing to say things that maybe we're not right and then going.
Now I have to be decisive. We don't have time. People honored that as well. So to me, it just enabled all the elements of my leadership.
As an individual, as a leader, and there's direct research that's out there that says the higher level of self-awareness is a direct correlation to some of the top most successful CEOs that are out there, and part of self-awareness is being able and journaling is identifying your emotions when you're making certain decisions and how they correlate to each other and processing those emotions.
So, kind of question for you then when we think about journaling and being that self-awareness kind of thing, do you think that in the leading realm people are just born with this? Are they born with that self-awareness? Are these skills or talents, behaviors that have to be developed?
For self-awareness, I took Emotional Intelligence 2. 0, I took that course, and read the book, and self-awareness was not high initially when I first took the assessment. And I started doing the exercises in the book. The nice part is I was able to retake that assessment and watch my score increase.
But I also see that if I were to take it again, it'd probably be a lot higher after writing the book because of the journaling that takes place in writing a book. So believe it's a combination of, some people are just born a little bit more with that innate self-awareness and then that still needs to be developed, no matter whether you're born with it or not.
See, I think, so I'm off the camp, I'm not in between.
I think that the majority of leadership skills are taught. That everybody's maybe, it's like music, you could be born with maybe a certain affinity for, or, but if you don't develop that, it just really isn't going to move anywhere.
But I think the interesting piece with this, when we think about leaders and resilience is that don't know anybody who goes, I'm just a resilient person. Nothing's going to affect me. And if they do. We all know now that's just fiction, right?
So that reinforces the idea that whether it's self-awareness through journaling or whether it's resilience and doing all the right things to make sure you and your team are resilient, these are learned skills that you have to work on.
And journaling is only good enough, especially at the later stages of a career when you get senior and you're leading and mentoring large teams, you have to do the work. So it's one thing to identify, something that's a default or something you're doing wrong. It's something else to say, okay, now this is where I want to get to, and here's the path that I need to go through.
So it sounds like you're a big component of personal development. Transcribe and take the steps to develop the skills that you want, not only for yourself but modeling it for other people to follow as well, as you're helping them develop the skills.
So I think I used to say to my teams, if I'm not spending 20 to 25 percent of my time, just developing you. Nope. Not defending the continent, not making sure the jets are set, not making sure the next campaign plan for the next two years is done. And all of the detailed things we have to do to make sure complex military operations happen.
The LEAR Framework
How were you mentoring the people?
How were you coaching the people who were leaving the organization? One thing to prepare resumes, not the tactile stuff. How are you mentoring and coaching them personally? What techniques were you using with them?
For them it was, I use kind of that, it's a framework that I've used, it's kind of always helped me, but it's LEAR, it's Listen, Explore, Acknowledge, Respond.
So first it was listening to how they were feeling, because that helped me identify, were they angry, were they frustrated, were they sad, where were they within the grief cycle of what had just taken place.
So listen, and acknowledge their feelings.
A lot of times people want to feel heard, they want to feel validated that their feelings are, you know, you just got laid off and you're frustrated and you're angry and you just dedicated five years to this organization.
Your feelings are valid to feel that way. And frustrated that you got let go versus the person who's only been here for two years.
Sometimes it was a little bit more tactical on things. Sometimes it wasn't even tactical. It was just, they wanted to hear that they were going to be okay. so it just depended on the person, but that's always a framework that I've used when it helps to address any challenging situation in conversations with my team.
Transitions are the best place for mentors. And that's what a lot of leaders inside of organizations do. Look at that, they're just looking at their own and in the team that they're leading. That's it. And I don't see those higher goals. And that's why I say elevate your relationship where it's a personally connected relationship with the individual.
You're going to care about them long after they leave the organization. This is where the fabric of real trust is going to happen.
To me, they're always a part of a friendship, a colleague, somebody that you care about goes far beyond that immediate time that they worked for you.
And that's hard for a lot of young leaders and middle managers, especially with the speed at which people are asking them to do things. This is why I say leaders have a role in setting that example.
Investing in the Growth of Your Team
You should always be developing your people into those next leadership roles. And in a really good talent management system, you're also saying to people, I'm not going to move faster. Then I can develop talent that moves into those spots. just can't.
In military organizations, you always have the mission that you have to inspire people to develop.
But the reality here is that if you have leaders who are willing to take the time personally to be able to show balance. So when I was a brigadier general, and then when I was a two-star general, especially inside the NORAD enterprise, there are phones in your house that have ringers throughout the entire house that wake you up.
And when you hear that ringer go off, you're running for a secure phone so that, you know, within 90 seconds, you can make decisions and start imagining all the bad things that could happen when you're defending a continent. Well, yeah, you're on call all the time. But I don't mind being on that kind of call all the time when I have the mental and physical capacities to be able to say, I'm not going to force that on my people.
We think that CEOs are working 80-hour work weeks. Are they? Or have they missed some of their socialization there? And there's transparency here.
Let me tell you what I did last week that I think is good. And if you want, well, I'd stay up late for a month. If I thought I could solve this problem of, you know, childcare for military families, how much of my extra energy would I burn if I did? I thought I could make that go back to that sense of purpose, right?
But it's more than setting that example for you. It's more than coaching. It's more than all of that. You have to be able to do all of those things at the same time so that people want to progress into that organization and want to progress through those skills. And that's when we say middle managers are the key.
So when you get to middle management, you're going to decide whether or not you want to progress.
And if you want good CEOs and good executives, if you want good organizations, you better be paying a lot of attention to those people who are making those choices. Because the people you self-select out might be the exact people you need.
People will be when they get there and will make a decision. Do I want to climb that ladder and get to that point where I might be able to get there? Better security for my family, more financial stability—all of those things are going to be the positive outputs of climbing that ladder.
What am I going to have to sacrifice to get there?
And if they're opting out, many of the people who are opting out are the ones that care so deeply about some of those foundational values that you want within your organization, family, and people. I'm not willing to compromise on the values of the company and organization; you know, companies that have strong values and understand who they are live those values through the actions of their leaders.
If they're self-selecting out because they see what that rat race looks like, you're going to have a talent management problem at the top end. I think there are a lot of organizations that are like this. When I say talent management, The best accountant doesn't make the best CFO or CEO.
And what distinguishes good from excellent is the leadership and coaching ability of those. People in those executive positions, then I want to pull that strain and tell me what that looks like for you inside of your company and what the behaviors around that are.
We didn't change the tempo. We didn't change anything else. We change our workflow so that we can get through things at the right time. By setting those examples and having the people who are going to do those things, you're rewarding the behavior. Now you get someone below you who, you know, is a division leader and says, I'm not going to do this.
You're going to be on all the time; take your leave. But when you get back, your inboxes are full. Stop. This doesn't work, and you see, watch the character and the behaviors of the people that you're going to promote from those middle management and lower management jobs because it's about leadership that you need to bridge the distance, not those competencies over here.
Charles Feltman, who wrote the thin book of trust. I like small books because, like your husband, I'm a helicopter pilot. My lips still move when I read, right? That's a joke. I hope it takes that away. The idea here, though, is that Charles Feltman came with four distinctions of trust. Care, sincerity, competence, and reliability.
Air is the first thing that people are going to resonate with. They're not going to care what you say. They're going to care about how you care about them. And by demonstrating care to the individuals that are on your team for their development, that kind of establishes those core pieces of trust.
So to me, I think this is where it all blends with talent management.
And if there's anything that's underlying all of this that I hear, it's a resonating message: care about the people; develop your people, and that's how you care: through developing your people and developing yourself as well.
It's important to develop the future leaders that are within your organization, as well as look at ways that you're developing yourself and evolving as a leader, preparing for change, and modeling the values for your organization.
