177. Integrating Faith Into Business with Gary Harpst

💭 Leadership is about more than strategy; it's about purpose and values. 

In this episode of the Leadership Project, Gary Har​pst, CEO and founder of LeadFirst, discusses integrating faith-based principles in business. Gary, a ​best-selling author​, keynote speaker and ​​ teacher, shares insights from his latest book 'Built to Beat Chaos' and his journey from a farm in Ohio to leading a successful software business. The ​podcast conversation delves into creating inclusive, values-driven organizations, leveraging people's intrinsic desire to create order from chaos, and the importance of trust and care in leadership. Gary also shares practical advice on balancing personal faith with business stewardship, emphasizing the role of purpose in overcoming chaos and fostering co-creation in teams.

🌐 Connect with Gary:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyharpst/
• Website: https://www.leadfirst.ai/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LeadFirst-ai

📚 You can purchase Gary's books at Amazon:
• Built to Beat Chaos: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394158408/
• Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981641105/
• Six Disciplines for Excellence: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0974858706/

Business & Society with Senthil Nathan

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Chapters

• 0:00 Business and Faith Integration in Leadership
• 11:09 Leadership, Values, and Inclusion
• 12:01 [Ad] Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
• 12:49 (Cont.) Leadership, Values, and Inclusion
• 27:02 From Chaos to Purpose in Leadership
• 28:33 [Ad] Virtual Rockstar
• 29:24 (Cont.) From Chaos to Purpose in Leadership
• 35:37 Co-Creation and Unity in Leadership
• 48:43 Building Inclusive, Purposeful Environments

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Is it possible to integrate faith into business without compromising diversity and inclusion? Can embracing the principles of faith help a team to create order out of chaos? I am joined today by Gary Harpst of lead first, we discuss the deep topic of religion in the workplace and how it can be celebrated in an inclusive way. Gary shares with us a three tier pyramid of how to look after our teams and the two central purposes of a leader you do not want to miss this. Enjoy the show. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Gary Harpst. Gary is the CEO and founder of an organization called Lead first, who help organizations with transformation around faith based integration into their businesses. He's also the best selling author of three books Built To Beat Chaos, which is his latest book, and the one that I want to focus on today, but also Six Disciplines for excellence and the Six Disciplines execution revolution. So a prolific author beyond those three books, he he also has a very successful blog and other publications that have been out there. So if you want to look into Gary's work more deeply, there's a lot of content out there for you to look at today, I want to focus on this. We're Built To Beat Chaos. It's it's piqued my curiosity absolutely instantly, and I'm sure it's going to be an interesting conversation today. So without any further ado Gary, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your interesting background and what led you to be focused on the work that you do today and to found lead first in the first place.

Gary Harpst: 1:55

Well. First of all Mick, thank you for what you do, and I appreciate just the platform or the ability to express things that I've learned that are deep on my heart. I grew up on a farm in northwestern Ohio, in in the US, and in that environment, my parents were shaped by the depression and were very work ethic centric. So I learned a lot of things about hard work and and self value at an early age, which shaped me. As I went to through my education, I found myself really interested in Business and Computer Science, sort of the marriage of technology and business problems, and as after I graduated, I began to notice some of I'm kind of an analyst, you know, I noticed things, and I try to do problem solving. And I noticed in my own behaviors in my mid 20s, that there's this curious behavior where people would say one thing and do another me and other people, and it seems to be a pervasive pattern. And we, you know, we talk about, let's get be fit, and then we don't do what it takes. Or in the business world all the time, people making promises and not falling through. And that led me on a different kind of a quest of, well, why? Why? Why are we the way we are? And ultimately, I, I'm a reader and a studyer, and I and I looked at a lot of different answers to that question, psychology and beyond. Ultimately, I found some of the best answers in some of CS Lewis's work and in the Bible itself. And so that I eventually became a Christian, and that shape has shaped my worldview, and that led to getting I'm still a business person, and I was some friends got into business at a young age, 29 and for the last 40 some years, we have still worked together. We still do and but what's, what has been the thrust or the focus of my life is business problems and and biblical principles integrated, and the infusion of those two is what lights my fire, so to speak. Now, I had a just providentially happened to start a business a year before the IBM PC was introduced, and we started a technology and a software business that caught fire. It wasn't brilliance on our part. We just did the right thing at the right time. And so we were in a very rapid growth business. We had to grow 50% a year to keep up. And so here I am as a young CEO, taking an organization from two people to 10 people to 50 people to 100 people to 300 people to 500 people, and going through all the dynamics of that growth cycle, and at the same time trying to figure out what it means state of great faith. And it was a laboratory of a lot of mistakes and a lot of learning. And so out of that set. SaaS, the business was very successful, and we sold it to a large competitor, and within 30 days, the combined entity was being sold to Microsoft. So I've just seen a lot of things, including a lot of mistakes on my own and a lot of success. And when I sold that, my wife gave me, I was kind of interfering in her life too much, and she gave me about two weeks to say, you need to find something else to do. And so that led me on the quest of what I'm doing now, which was to help other small businesses who were going through that sort of growth curve. How do you how organizations change so rapidly in the way you have to lead them and manage them, from that 25 employee to 1000 employee journey, and I was, I've been fascinated on that those organizational dynamics and the challenges it brings, and, more recently, the the understanding that at least in America, we're seeing such rapid cultural change, and there's a sense of we're losing some of the underpinnings of our society. And I begin to think, are there ways to reintegrate faith even more and help others who want to do that? And that's what led to lead first. Lead first is really a culmination of my life's journey of learning business processes and the realization that there are appropriate ways to integrate your faith that will help a lot of people and and and do it in a way that you recognize not everybody believes what you believe lead first is a culmination of lots of business best practices, a technology reinforcement of how to manage those best practices, and an integration of that with leadership development that comes at the world or or leadership from a Christian perspective, biblical perspective, so that what that might mean is, everybody in the world would agree you want to treat people right. The Christian perspective is you do it because your people are creating God's image. So it's not a it's not always that you believe something different is valuable. It's why you believe it's valuable that can change. So, that in a nutshell in my background.

Mick Spiers: 7:32

All right, great start, and congratulations on your success in both chapters of your life. There's, there's two key things I want to explore. The first one is this values and our behaviors. So, you are right. Quite often, our stated values and our behaviors are not congruent with each other, right? We know what we need to do, but we don't that doesn't always match. I want to come back to that one. The second one I want to come back I want to go to is this faith based approach. And clearly, you're a Christian, a very proud Christian, but there's not, there's more than one religion in the world. You said that you you, you said that you don't want to do it in a way that doesn't, you know, turn people away that have don't believe in the things that you believe, and there are other faiths in the world, how do you create a faith based, integrated organization in a way that doesn't dismiss diversity and inclusion?

Gary Harpst: 8:34

It is a great question, and I would say that Jesus himself modeled that, you know, he he really welcomed interfacing with all people in all walks of life, but yet he knew who he was, and he had certain principles that he advocated, but he didn't try to force them on people. He just offered them to people. And so we've found that our best target market for our services is somebody who owns a business, and that you know that the ownership of a business is different than being an employee, and that you know the biblical concept of ownership is like stewardship. In other words, you are, you have a responsibility to manage whatever has been given to you on behalf of someone else. And so what that means is, if you have a worldview that there is a God, and that he, that God created you, and that everything you have and are was a gift from that person, then you approach running your business with that frame in mind, and so that that, to me, means that if there's dishonesty going on in my organization by an employee, I'm responsible for that because it's my organization. It also means that if somebody's not being treated fairly or properly within the organization, that's on me and but it also means that I'm I am clear with people about what motivates me and what shapes the way I make decisions. I'm open about that, but I I'm open about it in a way that says I understand you may not believe that, but you need to know who I am, and you're working for an organization that is owned by somebody who thinks and believe makes decisions this way. To me, it's the only way to have integrity is to be clear. So, what? Well, let me stop there any reaction to that.

Mick Spiers: 10:40

Yeah, it's a really good start. So, the the word that actually popped into my mind when you're talking was the word shepherd, and to use a biblical context, there Shepherd and a flock and and, and a leader is not there to push people around there, there, to create an environment where, where people feel included, where they feel that they can do their best work, etc, etc. So, so getting out there and being very clear about your principles, and then attracting people that believe in the same principles that you believe, whether they believe in the same God or different reasons, they believe in the same values. And this is where the word values was coming to me before. So that's probably my first reaction, is, I mean, one of the great attributes any leader can have is to be able to clearly articulate what they believe in, and then they will attract people that have common beliefs and and I'm once again, I'm not talking about Which God do you believe in or which religion you live in, but the same values about how you treat other human beings, about the culture. So starting to create a culture where people will have some level of feeling of inclusion and feeling of, I'm going to say, safe, feeling safe in the environment, because they know that they're going to be treated in the way they want they want to be treated. How does that sit with you?

Gary Harpst: 12:40

Oh, I think perfectly. And, you know, we think of it as a three tier pyramid that at the base level, we refer to this idea of, how do you create an organization that is healthy? The organization itself is healthy, and its people are healthy and and they they feed off of each other. Healthy People make for a healthy organization, and a healthy organization make people healthier. And so from a Christian perspective, how do we come into the marketplace and say, you know, even if you don't believe what we believe, here are the reasons you it's still good for you to work for us. And so we have this lowest layer that we call sort of, most people will say that people are body, soul and spirit. I mean, some kind of recognition that there's a physical need, there's an emotional need, and there's sort of a spiritual part of us that's hard to define. And so at the physical layer every all people in all around the world, doesn't matter what their worldview would say, I want a place that I'm treated right. I want a healthy business economically. So I think I'll have a job next year like I have now. I would like one that's growing so that maybe I can do something new a few years from now in this organization, and I like a business that's managed well enough that there's just not chaos, and I can come to work and enjoy it. And so everybody agrees with that, yeah, I don't heart you know. Now the next layer is what we call whole person care, more of the soul care, which is to begin to look at an individual, not just as somebody in in their 40 hours of work, but who are? Who is that person inside and outside of work? That that is soul care. And it's not unique to Christianity. It's it's the in the Christian world, we call it love your neighbor as yourself, just begin to see people as valuable in and of themselves, and that there's more to their life than just the 40 hours, the eight hours they're in in the office. So if you're if you're good at soul care, you start developing leaders who begin to take an interest in the lives of their people, and to the extent practical, if there are ways the organization can help people outside their lives, like we Some examples are sometimes you train people on disc assessments or personality assessments in the organization, and they say, you know that would be great to do at home. Well, could you provide that service at home? Or could you provide marriage counseling or all kinds of things that help people outside of work? We call that soul care, and really, there's only so far you can do without the person involved. So, selecting in, in other words, the company can do things in the eight hours, but I can't force you as an employee to share what's going on at home. Are you following what I mean? And so that second layer grows from everybody wants it to some people want the second layer. Some people just leave me alone. I'll do my eight hours with you, and everything else is private, so you can't intrude on that layer beyond what people want. Okay, now the third layer is what we call Kingdom impact. And it's, it's a biblical, very biblical term that in the prayer, the best way to think about what, what is the kingdom is in the famous teaching Jesus said, when he's teaching people to pray, said, Our Father, Who is in heaven, then you prayed for his will to be done and His Kingdom to be established on earth as it is in heaven. Well, once you get to that third layer, you're into what does it mean to be doing God's will? And do you believe in that particular God? And do you believe in the Christian doctrine? So Christianity says, Jesus says he can do things for you that I can't do. That's a third layer. This third layer is completely optional. And here are examples that think that Jesus says he can do because he's says, claims to be God. And you may not believe this, that's fine, but the presentation is he says he can heal your inner parts. He can he can help you get over what's wrong with you. If you think there's things wrong with you, he can love you unconditionally. He can give you what he calls eternal life. So there are things that I can't do that, right? I can't do that in a relationship with you. That second layer I can do. The first layer a healthy business does the second layer? Layer good neighbors do. And the third layer is this thing that's unique to what Jesus claims he can do that others can't. So we that you can't force on people. You can only say, Here's what he says he can do, and if you're interested, here's where you find out more about it.

Mick Spiers: 17:49

There'd be a tricky ground on that. Third one is to make sure it doesn't feel like it's being imposed on people, but, but let me share what I'm taking away. So, so this first layer about creating this environment where where people do feel like they're working in a business that has got longevity, has got opportunity, has got the right values in terms of their own values, like the congruence there. Then the second one, the soul care, looking at seeing the whole of the person, not not just the person that shows up at work, but seeing the whole of the person. And at this point, these first two layers, I'm seeing an environment where the word that comes into my mind is authenticity, where people can show up as their authentic self, where they feel seen, where they feel heard, where they feel valued, where they feel like they matter. These are all wonderful fabrics of what a great business and a great team can look like. And this third one is then the spiritual element, right so and and allowing people at their own kind of discretion to explore their own spirituality. How does that sit with you? Yeah, okay.

Gary Harpst: 19:05

Yeah, I think that's a good description. And if I can give you an example of how this actually plays out in the United States, at least something that has become popular is what's called chaplaincy. Have you heard that phrase corporate chaplaincy or something like that, and I was talking to a chaplain. Basically, a chaplain is somebody who's a professionally trained to operate at the soul care layer and be attentive. If somebody wants to move to the spiritual layer, they're good at being at the soul Layer Layer, and offering the spiritual if somebody wants it, and so when they come into an organization, what the research is showing in the United States at least, is that many of the caring programs for employees are not nearly as Effective when they are administered from within the organization, and actually people are more likely to be open and share things that are not on the HR department or part of the management structure. And so some of the value of chaplaincy organizations is they're actually outside the organization. You follow that logic. And so I'll just tell you a story. I was talking to chaplain. We use a chaplain in our we've got four businesses we own, and we, we just enrolled chaplaincy in our businesses. And I was talking to chaplain, he he told this story. He said, usually the way it works is the CEO or the owner comes in and says, Hey, we're going to provide this service. Here's. The phone number or the way to get a hold of a chaplain. Here's what they do. You can talk about anything and everything. It's confidential. If you've got to complain about things way things are working to work, you can complain to him, but no names, nothing you say to that person will ever come back to the organization. And so the this gentleman, this chaplain, was telling about another organization he went into, and he was introduced, and somebody pulled him aside and said, You know, I have some things I'd like to talk to you about, but I don't want you ever to talk about church, Jesus, the Bible, lead me out of that. And he said, That's fine, bro. I just want to build a relationship with you and and this went on for four years. These guys became good friends, and the chaplain honored that he never crossed that line. But after the fourth year, the guy got cancer, and he began to think about his mortality, and he began to think, is there something else spiritual? And he wanted to open that topic. So he gave the the chaplain permission to say, I I appreciate you've never crossed this line, but I would like to know more about what you believe in your faith. So my, I just want to illustrate that's the that's the scene between done well, the soul care is done with permission, and the spiritual care is done with permission. And there was a good outcome in that story with with the gentleman and his family and and he, he really became a Christian through this process, but it took four years of proving that he the guy, really loved him.

Mick Spiers: 22:20

I think your three layers are perfect, Gary, and let me play back to you like so the business layer, or the environment of the team, then this soul care layer of taking real care of the whole of the person I absolutely love. And that doesn't have to be religious, religion specific income. It can be quite agnostic in that regard. And then this third layer, the spiritual layer, I'll just throw to you that that could present itself in multiple ways. So if you, if you have a very diverse workplace, it the spiritual layer may be allowing, allowing, on a Friday afternoon, for for Muslim workers to go and take afternoon prayers, for example, I agree with it. And then for Christian if they wish to have a discussions around, around Jesus, around the Bible, then that's there too, right? So that, and it's not not imposed, but it's available.

Gary Harpst: 23:15

Available. I agree with you, and I'm I know there's some people that in all religions that become what's the right word, they're no longer open. And I don't believe it. I don't believe that's what Jesus did, either. He he was not afraid of somebody bringing other ideas to him. He was clear about who he was. So I love your description of the third layer. Now here's what I would overlay with that is, if the owner of the business, that's a key word, owner, the one who feels like they have a stewardship and accountability for to God, they should be clear that with their organization, that that third tier to them means this. It doesn't that this is who I am. This third tier for me is is Jesus based? For you, it may be something else. And I think where we really go wrong is we don't know how to be true to ourselves and be open to other people who believe something else. We don't know how to do that.

Mick Spiers: 24:18

That's where the authenticity comes in. I think what you're describing allows me to be go, yep, you can have your beliefs. These are my beliefs and and there is a there's a big push in the western world towards being much more open and giving people the opportunity to have rituals that allow them to express themselves spiritually and their beliefs and their faith and their background, etc, which is wonderful. I do feel we may get controversial here for a second. Gary, I do feel it's sometimes been at the expense that then people of a Christian faith have not had the same opportunity. So bear with me for a second, and I know that all general, all generalizations, are wrong, but some are useful. I feel like over a period of decades, Gary, that if you work one o'clock, back a bit, in the Western world, I would say it was not an open, inclusive workplace, or even in some countries nations, it was other other religious beliefs, other other interests, other races, etc, even were not celebrated, did not feel included. And I think we've made a lot of ground around making sure that we take the time to celebrate things. Like Diwali, celebrate marbarak and to have these environments. But let me share something that happened in Melbourne this Christmas just gone past. One of the local councils, when they were putting up all of their signs, they just put up signs that said Merry cheer instead of Merry Christmas. And the thought of celebrating Christmas was seen as non inclusive. But all I can think of, and I am not trying to impose my own beliefs here in any way, all I could think of is, hang on a second. We celebrated Diwali, we celebrated Ramadan, we celebrated all of these things. Why aren't we allowed to say Merry Christmas? So do you feel like, in some cases, the Western world has gone swung the pendulum all the other way, where we used to be non inclusive, and that was not good, and now swung the other way, where Christians don't feel like they can celebrate their beliefs without feeling like it's, it's going to be non inclusive to people that are not Christians. Thoughts.

Gary Harpst: 26:45

Yeah. Well, I think you're absolutely right. The idea of that there's a lot of different ways to be prejudicial, and we in the interest of bringing balanced or or restoring some things where we've been prejudiced, or we've now turned into prejudice, of it, of what was the source of the original problem. So I agree, we see it in the United States, and I don't know the culture there, but here we we because of social media, and there's a lot of a coercion attempting to be put on people either be silent on this or do this, or don't do this through pressure. We won't buy from you unless you say this or you know, and you know, Jesus never He, never forced. I love the model, by the way, if you if you read the New Testament and stories about Jesus, he, would walk by a lake and say, Hey, Peter, Paul, I'm cub fish. Come with me. I'm fishing for men. And by the way, he kept walking and either join me or don't. That was, that was kind of Jesus's model. He never begged anybody to believe it. He just says, This is what I think is true. And if you want to know more, come with me. So that's my mindset. I like to be around people that think differently than I do, and don't try to tell me what to believe, and I tell them what I believe and why I believe it, and then we can have intelligent conversations and learn something. Anyway, I'm preaching now.

Mick Spiers: 28:55

No, it's really good. All right, so we've covered three layers. I think that's already a strong takeaway. I want to get back to where Built To Beat Chaos. What does that mean, Gary?

Gary Harpst: 29:06

Wow, we're into some really interesting things. The Bible says that sometimes people miss and so there's this premise in in this the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis. People, some people get way hung up on is this six to 11, seven literal days or whatever. And I think they missed the forest for the trees. The most important thing in in there is that it says that God created us in His image. So there, there's a premise there, and you can either except no, there is no God, so this is worthless, or it's telling me something. So first of all, it says it's created in His image. And it's about 20 some verses in paragraphs, if you will, down into the first chapter. And if you pause and ask yourself, Wait a minute, you're telling me, God, that I'm created in your image. Well, what is it I if? What are you like? If I'm like, if I'm created to be like you, what are you like? And if you look at the first 26 verses, that's all we know about God at that point. We we know verse one is that He created everything. That's the premise. And then we know that he started bringing order out of what he created in six subsequent stages. And so I'll ask people. I say, okay, they're very familiar with that story. And I said, what's the first thing God created? And they'll try to remember back to Sunday school, and they might say, wasn't it light, or was it the waters? I forget? I said, No, the first thing he created was chaos. The very first sentence of the Bible says, In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and they were void and without form. That's one definition of chaos, unstructured material. And so right away, there's a there's a hint that we are created to be like God. And what is God like? God takes chaos and then he brings order out of it gradually. And I would submit to you that I believe there's a deeper message in Genesis that says, When God says we're created to have dominion, he. Is we are created in my image, to have dominion, to rule over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and the animals of land. In other words, everything I've created here, I want you to quote rule over it. Well, he's shown us what rule means by the previous verses. He said, rule means to take darkness and bring light. It means to take unformed things and bring shape out of them, take dead things and bring life. And so my belief, my deepest belief, and that's why the book was written, is that every single human being has the wiring, the DNA inside of them that craves to bring order out of chaos, to make things, build things, create things, music. Music is taking random thoughts and turning it into order. Cooking a meal is the ultimate expression of taking all these ingredients and forming a menu and eating it all of life is we're we're built to do that, and we're not happy if we're not somehow expressing that inner DNA and the leadership connection here is you will be a much better leader if you understand The basic chemistry of people, that when you have a group of people and they're not happy, and you've got this guy you can't ever make satisfied, he comes into work mad. You, if you understand that, that everybody was created to win, you start to get insight that there's something deeper going on in that person that is triggering this behavior, and at the root of it, they are not winning. They may not even know this. They may they may not know why they're grumpy. Or you know, you ever wake up in the morning and don't feel right, and you're a glass half empty, and a leader will do better than if they understand that everybody on his team really needs to win. They don't just want to win. They need to win. And you have to help them discover in larger life what winning means. And you can win at home in your family, you can win in any job, but what does it mean? And if you're a leader, you help people discover that rather than attacking their behavior, you come back to what motivates you.

Mick Spiers: 33:43

There's a powerful message here already, Gary, and I want to share with you what I'm taking away, and it's bringing up whole heap of thoughts around things like micromanagement, right? So leaders that turn up to work every day thinking that their job is to tell people what to do when every one of those individuals wants to be a creator of some kind of semblance of order out of the chaos that they're in. So how do we now the second word that's coming up, get rid of the micromanagement. Let's get to empowerment. How do I empower and enable my team so that they feel like they are creating order out of chaos in their own patch. How does that sit with you?

Gary Harpst: 34:28

It's it's the right question, for sure. And I'd like to give another analogy. Let me first just answer the question, the way you attack chaos is purpose. Purpose is how you bring order out of chaos and but, but let me tell you a story that or an insight from the Bible that really has shaped my understanding of what leadership is. It says in the Bible that God reveals Himself in creation itself, not just in written words, preachers, those sorts of things he said, If you study science, if you look at the way the world is created, you will understand more of who I am. That's what the Bible says. And so people say the Bible and science are in contradiction. That's not biblical. The Bible says that real science reveals truth about God. Well, here's what's interesting. 98% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen and helium. 98% of everything we can see is made up of the two simplest atoms. There are, helium has what one, one electron, and hydrogen has two

Mick Spiers: 35:47

I have other way around, but close enough. or I may.

Gary Harpst: 35:50

Yeah.

Mick Spiers: 35:51

Yep.

Gary Harpst: 35:51

Yeah. So, so here we have, there's to me, there's a message here. This is so strange that all this complexity and this beauty and the sense I have when I eat my meal, and the things I smell and taste come out of a giant system that is only made up of atoms. I think there's a leadership lesson in this. There's some there's some profound truth. And the truth is this that Chris. Creation is not about the substance. It's not about the inputs. It's about how you order those inputs. It's what you do with those inputs. And so you and I are have the same molecular structure, not molecular structure, the same atomic components of about three buckets of water and a bucket of coal, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, and the only difference is the way those electrons or atoms are joined together in a different sequence, in different combat combinations to form different compounds. So here we have a world. One of the most profound questions I ever got to ask in was in my sociology 100 class, the very first class I took in college, and the gentleman says, think about this, why is it the world has progressed enormously technologically and not at all socially? That question has stuck with me for 40 years, and the Bible answers it. The answer is rooted in understanding the laws of physics and understanding the laws of human nature. Physics are repeatable, so what Isaac Newton learned gets passed on to the next generation, and we can count on the working the same way, so each subsequent generation can build on the learning of the previous because it's predictable and repeatable. When it comes to human nature, God said in Genesis that we can't fulfill this purpose of having dominion without working with other people. He says, multiply and fill the earth. And that means that the he set this whole creation up that we can't fulfill our destiny without working with other people. Now here's the problem, people don't obey the laws of physics. So here I am as a leader with two dimensions of my job. I've got the things that I'm working on in the assembly line that obey the laws of physics. I've got the people that are running the assembly line that don't obey the laws of physics, and then now you're into, well, what is it that makes people work together? What is it that allows people to join together and achieve a purpose? And the premise of the book is that there's two central purposes of a leader. Number one is to determine, I mean, yeah, Central, central responsibilities of a leader. Number one is a leader has to determine purpose, and then a leader has to know, have the skills to love and care for people in such a way they get the right people in the right spot working toward that purpose. So one is a very soft skill, human love your neighbor as yourself. The other is physical knowledge about how the universe works. So as a long, long answer to the question. And of course, we're not very good at the second part. We're not very good at loving our neighbor.

Mick Spiers: 39:16

Yeah, I'm loving this metaphor. Let me, let me play some of it back to you, Gary, so I'm going to start back to your atomic elements, right? So this is really cool. So yep, hydrogen is the most prolific element in our universe, one one electron, one nucleus. You know, it's a base matter, right? And then when we go beyond that, we can start going, Oh, we can start building something. And bear with me for a second. And then as as the atom becomes more complex, it starts turning into other things, helium, oxygen, carbon, you name it, right, yeah, yeah. But then the interesting thing, then, let me play this to you from an atomic point of view, and then going to bring it to the world, the world of co creation. When two hydrogen atoms come together with an oxygen atom, they go, Oh, wow, we can create water. Now imagine, now imagine that in the workplace, when we hold space for each other, right? And now imagine the workplace is full of hydrogen and atoms and oxygen atoms, and let's say you and I work together. You've got certain superpowers, Gary, you're, you're amazing at what you do. I've got, I'm I've got weaknesses, but I also have certain superpowers and things that I'm good at. When we get together and we hold space for each other and we put, we park our egos at the door and we go, You know what, Gary, you and I, if we get together and we shared our superpowers, we might be able to solve this problem or achieve this purpose. So it's, it's that world of co creation, but what gets in the way is the ego. How does that sit with you?

Gary Harpst: 41:00

Well, I think you're right on. And the Bible says the root of our problem, it has to do with our ego and pride and arrogance. But you also said something else that I want to kind of tease out a little bit. You said you would get them to work together towards something. So many times, leaders fail to get the group on the same page about what the purpose is. And if you don't establish that first, I use the analogy when we build a home, my wife and I are out in a edge of a woods, and they brought truckloads of materials out there. There's cement and, you know, all kinds of things, roofing materials, a two before his nails. And it frankly looks like a form of chaos. You drive by and all this junk set land there, and then a guy drives up with a blueprint. And now all of a sudden, oh, that two before I know how to use it, or that piece of whatever metal. And so the same thing is true with a group. You can't get a group. I don't know how to use you as an engineer unless I know what I'm trying to build. I need electrical engineer or I need them. And so these two things work together. If you don't get the purpose clear, then all the teamwork will fail. If if you get the purpose clear and don't do the teamwork, the purpose will fail, yeah, so you can't do one without the other.

Mick Spiers: 42:29

Yeah, I love it. And now we're getting to like, vision and purpose. So, so the architect might have had a vision for what this building was going to look like. The project manager of the of the building might have a clear understanding of the purpose and how we're going to get there, and then, if we can get people aligned, we'll start building the same house, whereas, if it's just left to the unique gifts of the individuals without a little bit of shepherding or custodianship, you'll end up with the the plumber is going to create the most amazing bathroom that you've ever seen, but it doesn't match the the kitchen or the carpentry or it does need that, that congruence, that alignment, yeah, yeah. Really good. I love it. So the question that has to be asked, then, how? What can we do more? Because this, this, these problems of incongruent and misaligned workplaces. They're everywhere. They're all over the world. Gary, how can, how can we get people to get beyond their egos, to hold space for each other, and to realize that to use your words before that every human being wants to create order from their own chaos, and then when we bring it all together, we can co create order from a massive chaos. How do we get people to park their egos and actually go into this?

Gary Harpst: 43:55

Well, there are two, two veins or threads to that answer. I'll give you one of them that is sort of the on the pyramid scheme at the soul level that ever all faiths would agree with, everybody would agree with. And so that the the approaches we use for caring for people, listening to people, those kind of skills, they really help. You know, I'll draw a little kind of a circle, if you will. Ultimately, what you want to do is build oneness, unity around that purpose. The Bible uses the term oneness, but we talk about unity or teamwork, but what it really means is all the pieces fit together around a shared purpose. But really, to get to oneness, you have to back up to say, well, I can only get to unity unless I get people in this group to talk to each other openly, and we figure out who's good at what and and we get the insights of everybody in the room that has experiences. You know something about electric electronics, somebody else knows something about plumbing. And together, we form, okay, this is the right way to get to our purpose. But guess what? We can't talk to each other openly unless we trust each other. And what is it that leads to trust. Now, trust, but you see, what I'm doing, I'm backing into a core requirement. And the core requirement of trust, at least in my experience, is I only trust you if I believe you care about me ultimately. I mean, I can trust you at some level if you repeatedly are predictable, but I'm not going to really share who I am with somebody who doesn't care about me. And so I would argue, Jesus said this. It's really interesting. There's 800,000 books in the Bible, Old Testament and New, 800,000 words in the Bible, Old Testament and New. And Jesus said, you really can sum up all that in about 18 words. And he he said, here's the here's the principle of human chemistry, love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself three, three elements of you've got to be secure on who. You are on the inside, love yourself, and then you give other people what you give yourself, and you do that all in context of who God is and what He wants for you. And that's my answer. That answer one is you have to care for people. If you care for people, your team, can start to be open with each other, and out of that openness, you can build better solutions to solving problems. And then that creates oneness.

Mick Spiers: 46:50

Absolutely loving this. And it's the it's the ingredient that needs to be there is that trust. Let me play back to you when I'm trying to process something Gary, one of the techniques I often use is to think about the opposite, and it really brings it for me. So you said trust only exists when I feel like the other person cares about me, and I'm going to say that when I flip that on its head, trust is immediately broken when the person feels that the other person has different motives, when they start questioning their intentions, when they feel like their actions are self serving instead of in my interests.

Gary Harpst: 47:34

I agree that then you're back to that selfishness thing you were talking about earlier. Same thing.

Mick Spiers: 47:38

Yeah. Okay, all right. Gary, this has been quite amazing, and I feel like you and I could probably talk for another eight, eight or nine hours, and we still wouldn't be done. But in the interest of you know, bringing the show to a close, I want to summarize a few things that that we've covered here, team, and bear with me, Gary, and I'd love you to also reflect on this at the end, so we can create faith based organizations that are still inclusive, that still encourage diversity. And we have these three layers. We have this layer of creating the business and the team, where the values and the and the purpose and everything about the environment is there that we can have this soul care, this second layer, where we look at the whole of the person and look at for every aspect of their life, including, you know, are they in the right mental state? All of those things, the soul care and then the spiritual care, without imposing your own beliefs on other people, you can create that environment where they can explore their own spirituality while still being open about your own spirituality. You don't have to, you don't have to hide that. You can tell people what you believe. Okay, so we have these three areas, and this is where we can start being the custodian of a wonderful environment. And then we started to get into this, this thought, and this was a big takeaway for me, Gary, the thought that every single human being wants to be able to create some kind of order from their chaos. And as leaders, we need to recognize that, not to think that we're the ones with all the answers. In fact, everyone needs to feel like they're part of the solution. They need to feel, yeah, they need to feel like they are part of the ones that's creating the or the order out of the chaos. Then when we get a group of people together with the same values, the same beliefs, and a common purpose, we can then start co creating a new world, a new solution to a problem and actually achieve that purpose, because we hold space for each other, we allow each other to create order from chaos in our own little patch, but in a way that cocreates something that's bigger than any of us individually could have created. How does that sit with you?

Gary Harpst: 49:58

I think that's a wonderful summary. I'm glad we're going to have this on tape. What you just said, because, yeah, you pulled all the pieces together and that lat, you didn't use the word synergy at the end, but that's what happens. You know, when you like you said, allow space for everybody, there's something mysterious happens, just like you get more than what you think you put into it. Yeah, and who would guess that we had some peach cobbler last night? Who would guess that you could take boring hydrogen and helium atoms and somehow reform them into carbohydrates and all the things that went into that delicious experience. It's there's synergy there, more than the parts.

Mick Spiers: 50:44

And then, I don't want to miss the point about the the the special ingredient of of trust that we need to trust each other, and when we and trust comes from knowing that the other person cares about you. And the opposite of that is when you start second guessing someone's motive, someone's intentions, or if the person genuinely is acting in bad faith, and I'm not talking about religious faith here. If they're acting in bad faith, trust is immediately gone, and you can forget about any cocreation at that point.

Gary Harpst: 51:17

I would say, if you think could sort through all this, what I've found is helping me the most at this stage of my life is is to pause and keep reflecting on purpose. Because, like, if you say something to me that irritates me, and I'm tempted to react and escalate and all that, you know, we see that in the world all the time. You say something you offended me, so I say something back, defending myself, and it escalates and gets out of control. The antidote for that, for me is to step back and say, Wait a minute. What's my purpose here in interacting with you? Our purpose here is to have a good interview and share something of value with somebody else. It's not to go down a rabbit hole and react to you, but to step back to the bigger purpose. If I, you know, with my wife or with a co worker or whatever, we all make mistakes and say things the wrong way and and the normal human behavior is reactionary, yeah, instead of proactive and God, I mean the idea of loving God, loving your neighbor as yourself, is a very proactive statement. It says my reaction to you is rooted in my relationship with my God, not in my relationship or reacting to what you do. I treat you right. In fact, the Bible says even if you're quote a servant, the lowest servant of all, a paid slave, he said, that does not keep you from living the kind of life I want you to live. It's amazing how he's saying quit reacting and be act from the inside out.

Mick Spiers: 52:48

Something I'd add there Gary is before you react. And this doesn't have to take long. Just take a beat and ask yourself these questions, is this reaction going to serve me well? Is it going to serve them well? And is it going to serve our purpose well? And if it's not, think about a better response, and.

Gary Harpst: 53:08

Amen, count to two.

Mick Spiers: 53:10

Yeah. Very good. All right, Gary, this has been amazing. I'd like to now bring us to our rapid round. These are the same four questions we ask all of I guess. So, what's the one thing Gary Harpst that you know now that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Gary Harpst: 53:29

Well, this is a very personal answer, so it doesn't apply to everybody, but what I learned that the gospel of Jesus Christ is that there's something genetically wrong with us, that we humanity is not what God intended. Now he has a very different answer, why we can't solve these problems, and it's because there's something broken inside of us. So I wish I had understood it 20 that truth, and again, this is a very New Testament Christian answer I'm giving you, and I wish I understand that new life. It's referred to as Zoe, but I did discover it later, and it changed who I am. It I'm. The Bible says I'm no longer who I was. I have this different set of motivations. So I wished I'd had understood that when I was 20,.

Mick Spiers: 54:18

Yeah.

Gary Harpst: 54:20

But I did discover it eventually, and it changed the course of my life.

Mick Spiers: 54:24

All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. What's your favorite book?

Gary Harpst: 54:28

Well, obviously so many the the call by Os Guinness. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but his his work. He he grew up in a pastor's family, preacher's family, and one day he was at a gas station, he's he's English and British, and he was at gas station and talked to the tenant at the gas station, and he realized he had this epiphany. He said, This is the first time I've talked to somebody outside my faith in months, and he said, There's something wrong with this. And he decided, I am not called to be a preacher and live inside of this glass house. I'm called to go out into the world. And the book, the call is basically to people of faith to live where they're at to live in their their life integrated, not balanced, but integrated.

Mick Spiers: 55:26

Yeah.

Gary Harpst: 55:27

Whatever they're doing,

Mick Spiers: 55:28

Yeah, I love it. Alright.

Gary Harpst: 55:29

I love that book. I probably read it three times.

Mick Spiers: 55:31

Alright. Love it, alright. Thanks, Gary. What's your favorite quote?

Gary Harpst: 55:35

Oh, boy, that that is a challenging one, too. And I'm back to a Bible verse. It's a quote. It says it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And it's back to that first question you asked, What do I wish I knew? You know, basically the Gospel says there's another kind of life you can have beyond this realm. And it's I found that it's true. And so that's my favorite quote. I have to keep reminding myself of that, because I wake up in the morning and I think, well, I made a lot of mistakes. I didn't do this right. I treated this person badly. I. I make so many stupid decisions and save so many stupid things, and I have to remind myself that God says, No, you're being made new. You're you're okay. Just pick yourself up and go forward. And I that truth helps me. It's no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

Mick Spiers: 56:39

All right, wonderful. And finally, thank you so much for sharing all of this. So you've given us a lot to think about. There's going to be, there's going to be a lot of people in the in the audience listening today that are probably struggling with the very things that we've discussed, whether it be building those environments with the three tiers, about about co creation about all of these things that we've been discussing, Gary. How do people find you, if they'd like to know more?

Gary Harpst: 57:04

Well, our website is leadfirst.ai, and on there are a number of resources. And by the way, there's a place there to just set up a meeting with me. I I'm at the stage of my life that all I like to do is talk to people. I let other people run the business, and I just like to have these kind of conversations, share my life, what I what I've learned, and I always learn from those I'm talking to. So that's the best place to go, the books available on Amazon or other places. By the way, we have a free app out there. We just decided to make it available. It's called point of view. And what it does is it teaches people to talk. You know, when you get in a room with sales and marketing and engineers and accountants and are trying to make a decision, every one of those people have a different personality. And so if you ask an open ended question about, How do we solve this problem, who will be the first to speak? The sales guys, the high D people oriented, will speak up. The engineers will sit there and be quiet. They don't want to talk. And this app, what it does is it does group brainstorming and lets each person talk individually, and then you learn something. It teaches people to listen to each other. So we're just giving that app away. It's not we just decided it helps people communicate better so.

Mick Spiers: 58:29

Yeah, love it all right. Thank you so much, Gary, and we'll put those links in the show notes as well. It helps people to find it. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insights. I personally feel richer for having this conversation. And I know we've given the audience, or you have given the audience, a lot to stop and think and reflect upon so, thank you so much.

Gary Harpst: 58:52

Well, thank you, Mick, you're doing, you're you're bringing order out of chaos, by the way, right? You're bringing insight into the world. So, thank you for what you do.

Mick Spiers: 59:03

You've been listening to The Leadership Project. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where you can join into our live stream shows The Leadership Project live and catch the video podcasts of these episodes. In the next episode, I'll be joined by Dr. Poornima Luthra of Copenhagen Business School, where we discuss the ripple effect of allyship. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP, Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now in the meantime, please do, take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.