In this episode, host Sharon DeKoning welcomes Jeff Mulligan, the COO of Astec Safety and a managing partner at AMI Group Astec Leadership Development, to share his extensive leadership journey on It's Time for Success. Jeff played a key role in founding the Bank of Alberta and was instrumental in launching the Interac network early in his career. He talks with Sharon about how his later transformation into leadership roles in credit unions helped develop his philosophy, which highlights strategic focus, execution excellence, and fostering strong team dynamics. 

Jeff stressed the importance of resilience, adaptability, and creating an environment where employees feel valued and empowered. There are five core human needs that leaders must address, according to Jeff: security, inclusion, control, fairness, and competence. He and Sharon discussed how he advocates for assembling teams of experts and fostering collaboration. Jeff believes leadership can be learned through experience and mentorship, and encourages emerging leaders to be bold, take risks, and embrace challenges. 

Jeff Mulligan is the Chief Operating Officer at ASTEC SAFETY Inc. and a managing partner at AMI Group/ASTEC Leadership Development, a management consulting firm specializing in leadership coaching, strategic planning, project management and internal team communications. Jeff is known for inspiring keynote presentations and workshops in the area of leadership and transformational Change.

Jeff has 47 years of progressive business leadership experience. 16 years as an independent business owner and working in management consulting, 11 Years as President & CEO of Commonwealth CU, and 20 years of operational banking and IT management at UNISYS, Credit Union Central, Bank of Alberta (Canadian Western Bank) and CIBC.

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Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:16] Thank you everyone for joining us today on the It's Time for Success: The Business Insights podcast. On today's episode, we are going to be discussing practical leadership and how that builds strong teams and a healthy culture. With us today is Jeff Mulligan. Jeff is the COO of Astec Safety and a managing partner of AMI Group Astec Leadership Development, which is a management consultant firm that specializes in leadership coaching, strategic planning, project management and internal team communications. I am personally stoked for this opportunity to speak with Jeff. As an entrepreneur, I want only the best for my team and I know it starts with me. Welcome Jeff, and thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:01:00] It's great to be here. I wore my logo shirt from It's Time in honor of this event. I'm happy to be here. At this point in our careers, and my career specifically, the biggest thing I can do is give back. I've had some very good fortune, I've been able to experience things that many won't get to experience, and what I have left to do is pass it on. A responsibility.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:01:24] Thank you for sharing. We can always learn. Tell us a little bit about your leadership history over the years. Just before we started recording, you gave me a little bit of a low down, but let's share some tips with our listeners.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:01:35] 1977, I graduated and went off to work, and I started with the Bank of Commerce. I had a really good career with the Bank of Commerce, was recruited by a company called Bank of Alberta, which went on to become Canadian Western Bank, which was just now announced, a merger, the National Bank of Canada. We started a Schedule A bank in 1984 in Edmonton. I was recruited by them to start a bank from scratch. If you start a bank, a Schedule A bank, from scratch, you learn an awful lot of lessons in a short period of time. I was responsible for all of the automation, all the systems, all the clearing, all the financial settlement. We started from scratch in a hotel room at the Mayfield Inn, had street level branches fanned out across Canada and were a full service.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:02:27] I moved to Lloydminster to become the number two guy at Border Credit Union in 1995. I was going to come for two years and then move on and be a CEO of a large credit union somewhere. As luck would have it, I became the CEO here the next year. Took Border Credit Union, then we did mergers to create Commonwealth Credit Union across northern Alberta, and then we did the final merger to create Service Credit Union. I moved to Edmonton for a year after that, and after that I retired and became the mayor in Lloydminster shortly after that for four years. Following that, I retired and this opportunity with Astec came along. It was quite a story, and we may have time for that later or not, we'll see. As to how we became the owners of Astec, we've taken Astec from a company that was financially strapped. Losing about $600,000 a year to where we are today. We had $2.4 million in debt, they were losing money when we took over. The company had a good reputation, a good brand, though. We've taken that and we've parlayed that into pretty big time financial success. In fact, our year end's February 28th and we will have a record year for both revenue and profit this year. The company has no debt, and we haven't used our line of credit in five years, so it's a pretty big success story.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:03:58] That is a huge success. Not only for Astec but for the credit union that you grew, what are the three main credentials that you need to reach that success?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:04:06] For me it was staying very focused on strategy and not getting knocked off your strategy. I used to see a lot of people that would say, been there, done that. You bring up an idea or you bring up a strategy and some smart ass in the back of the room would say, we've been there, done that. My question is, every time somebody says that, have you been there and done it well, or have you been there and didn't execute properly? Was the idea bad or was the execution bad? I think it's really important to always stop when people want to quickly cast off an idea that seems fundamentally sound because they couldn't execute. The key is making sure that you build organizations that are high on execution. Absolutely ask yourself the question, have you really been there and done that, or have you been there and done it badly?

Sharon DeKoning: [00:05:10] So you come up with a plan, you come up with an idea. How do you execute? You can't do it on your own.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:05:16] No, absolutely not. The key in leadership is always, can you put a group together that envisions the same end game clearly, and can they achieve more together, and do they believe that they could individually? Merv Loewen, he was an educator here in town, he sat on the board of directors of the credit union. Merv came to me and he said, have you ever thought about a leadership coach? I thought about it for a bit and I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a confidant that I could speak openly to on strategy, on what was bothering me? Could I legitimately get 5% better on an annual basis in my leadership skills? He introduced me to a fellow named Bruce Gordon, Mentor Matrix out in BC. If you are in your usual behavior, that's what people are anticipating, that's what people are responding to. When you're in stress behavior, people are pushing back, they're trying to figure out what's going on. A poor leader, you hear about them all the time. You'll hear staff sitting outside the boss's office saying, today's not a good day. I wouldn't do it today. Staff and your team should never have to worry about what kind of day you're having. If they have to start to consider the ebb and flow of your days, then you are holding up and binding the whole organization to a point of gridlock. What I've tried to do and what I've learned, back to your original question, is never try to have too high a high or too low a low. I try to stay in that middle zone because when you have a high high or a low low, it ripples through the entire organization. You have to remember that people emulate success and you're considered success. They will emulate your behavior, your style, what you accept, what you don't accept. You've got to make sure what you allow yourself, to go on the high highs and low lows, is narrower and you don't stay there long.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:51] I like that phrase, they'll mimic what you accept and don't accept. That's huge. Let's say I'm a fantastic hairdresser, I'm an amazing welder, I'm an amazing mechanic. I think, I'm going to start my own business because I'm so good at these things. What do you say to somebody like that, that's wanting to venture off onto their own? What words of advice would you give them?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:08:21] The first thing I ask them is, do you currently outwork everybody where you work? Are you prepared to outwork the competition? Because there will always be somebody smarter, there will always be somebody with more money, there will always be somebody who seems to be more advantaged than you. Are you prepared to outwork the competition and make that your brand? If you are, then I don't care whether you're selling jeans or you're doing promotional items or you're selling fire extinguishers. If you're prepared to outwork the competition, lead by example, and prove that there's nothing that you wouldn't do as a leader to make success happen, then you're prepared to go out and go into business yourself.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:09:07] I find it's hard sometimes. For me, I kind of fell into it, it's a little bit different. But I know of other people who've gone off on their own, but they're not leaders, so they struggle. There's different types of people, so they struggle. What happens if they think they have the work ethic? They can outwork, they have the work ethic, but they're not the leadership. What do you suggest to those people?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:09:33] I think if you're compelled to be the one who knows the most all the time, you should not go into business. If you're compelled to be the one that has to know everything better than everyone else, you should be an engineer. You should be a technician. You should be a mechanic. You should be a technical expert within a company. If you have to know everything better than everyone who works for you, then you are going to put a glass ceiling on your company's ability to succeed. I am not a specialist of anything. I am a generalist, I am one of the best generalists in the country. Because of that, everybody in my company is compelled to take ownership of their area of expertise and know it better than me. When people understand that I don't have a compelling desire to be the guy who knows the most about anything, I have a compelling desire to have a team of people that are the best in their specific fields and areas of responsibility. If I build a company that enables that foundation, that springboard and that kind of support, then my companies will succeed.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:01] Do you feel that leadership can be taught? Do you think that we're born with it, or do you think it can be taught?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:11:08] I think you can observe it and you can bring it into your being. I don't think you can go take a bunch of schooling and turn that into 'how to be a leader'. I think that you have to be around it, you have to be open to accepting the lessons. One of the things I had written down as we're thinking about this is, if you give people a chance to impress you and you create this supportive environment in which they can, they most often will. I come from a single parent family, my dad left when I was nine years old. You're supposed to be able to trust your parents. My dad told me he was going to the corner store, he'd be right back. He never came back. From day one, I didn't know who to trust or what to trust in my life. If you can't trust your own parents, who the heck can you trust in this world? My dad said he was just going to the corner store to pick up some ketchup, I think it was. He never returned. He met his girlfriend at the corner, and never came back. That's how I got started. My mom worked about three jobs. She instantly was in debt because of that. I can tell you that back in 1969, when my dad walked out the door, it wasn't easy for single mothers. There was no such thing as credit established. She made $1.35 an hour. She had to go get a job when he didn't come back that day, because he was a policeman and she had to go look for a job. He had mortgaged the house, he'd refinanced the cars, she had all this debt all of a sudden and no job. At that point, she had to work about three jobs. I was now nine, ten years old.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:13:14] I became the father of the family, for my younger sister. At that point, I got through high school. I finished high school at age 15. I started high school at 12 years old, I was done at 15. I graduated from college at 17, and I went to work. When I went to work my mom said to me, you put your nose down and work hard, and if you're lucky you might get noticed and you might get to keep a job and be promoted. That was my first day of work at the Bank of Commerce. Today, that's not what parents are telling their kids when they come to work, and that's not how we expect to get lead. When they come to work today, they want to have influence on day one, they want to be respected day one, they need to be included on day one, they need to know that their work makes a difference on day one. We as leaders, it's incumbent upon us to figure it out. Back when I was doing a lot of research, only about 3 or 4 years ago in our leadership consulting company, I came up with five core human needs that we need to satisfy as leaders today for our teams. The first one is security. I need to feel secure and safe and supported, that the boss and the team have my back. That's not something we would have said in '76, that's not something we would have said in '96.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:14:50] Today when somebody comes to work, they need to know that the boss and the team have their back. The second one is inclusion. I need to be included and heard, I expect to have input and influence. That's very different from going to work for your first week of work 25 years ago. But today when you come into the workplace, I expect to have input and influence. The third five core human needs today for people coming to the workforce is control. I need to know where we're going, and I need to know that the plan is realistic. Talk to me. You need to communicate your plan, they need to envision it with you, they need to share that vision. That's somebody who starts with you in the front line today. That wasn't the case when I went to work. Now, justice and fairness. Probably hear this more from the 20 year olds to the 30 year olds than ever before. They talk about respect, justice and fairness. They say, I need things to be fair and equitable. I need to be respected. We always respected the people that worked for us 20 years ago and 40 years ago and my 48 year career, but today it's right in front of us. You hear the 20 year olds use it all the time in their language.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:16:17] Our generation, we had to earn that respect.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:16:21] Exactly. Now, it's assumed. When you hear, whether it be music and artists today talking about and people saying, don't disrespect me. They use it all the time. It's a very different use of it and how it plays out in the workforce. The fifth thing when I did my research was competence. I need to be capable, effective and skilled. I think more than anything, this hasn't changed. If you're standing at the counter, even in your shop or mine, and you don't have the tools, the information or the knowledge, you know that the customer knows that you don't know. There's no worse feeling in the world. It's almost like having your pants pulled down in public. More than ever before people are saying, I need to be capable, effective and skilled. I need to feel competent. Those five core human needs are what we have to drive ourselves to as leaders. Are we creating an environment? Are we creating a culture? Are we creating the tools, the training, and the support to provide those five core human needs so that our companies and our individuals who work with us and teammates can blast off?

Sharon DeKoning: [00:17:40] We call that last one, for confidence, we refer to it as setting them up for success. That's our motto here is 'set them up for success'.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:17:49] I always say to my teams, if we can do that then do you understand that every morning when you get up, and I don't care whether it's in business or in your career, you're either predator or prey. Either way, whether you're a predator that's going to catch and kill your food, or whether you're a prey that's going to be caught and killed and eaten for food, you'd better hit the ground running. On a given day, your business might be a predator in some situations, and you might be prey in other situations. But in order to get to the end of that day and get back to winning, be the winner, you've got to run faster than everybody else. You're either predator or prey. Think of all the business situations you go into in a day and a week and a month. You're one of those two, you're a predator or prey. The only thing that you need to be doing is making sure that you don't stand around wondering if your predator or prey. You got to get up and run. While you're running, decide. We're running as optimum as we can as the organization. Now, is this scenario predatorial or are we prey? Either way, you have to be running faster than the competition.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:10] I know it's a little bit off topic, but I always think that if you do the best that you can be, the rest will come. Be the best that you can be as far as work, as far as your work ethic, as far as your product, as far as a good person.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:19:33] As leaders, what we have to do is get people to see value in everything they do. We have to get people to understand that you can be highly valuable in achieving the strategic goals of the company without being the CEO, without being a vice president, without being a manager. The fact that we get our phone answered in three rings is highly important to our image and reputation, and very important to us achieving our goals. Now, how do I compensate for that? How do I recognize that? How do I reinforce that as a leader? All of those things are important. I think one of the questions you had is, beyond money, how do you motivate these people? You can't just keep opening the door and pouring money into the pit. If all things are equal, if people are paid equitably and you can prove the internal and external equity and you continue to monitor that, it's important. Because if a person feels that they're unfairly compensated, it's like a toothache. When you have a toothache, you don't think about anything else but that toothache. It gets in the way of you being able to be your best you. The first thing we have to do is say, if we're in business, we've got to pay equitably and establish where we want to be as a payer. We want to be a top third player. We want to be in the top third percentile of pay in every category in which we have people working for us. But that also means I can ask you to perform in the top third percentile.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:21:35] We don't accept anything less than that because that's the kind of company we want to be. Beyond those things, what we believe is that you have to have a program that identifies emerging young leaders. You've got to recognize them and have a program for those people. If people want to advance their education, you've got to have a platform for which you can help fund that and how you can make available support for that. We try to give these experiences that I talked about, where ordinarily you might not be in this meeting or that meeting, or you might not get to go to this conference with the CEO, but you do because you're getting an opportunity to grow. We give these growth opportunities, and then we very much believe in leadership coaching. When it comes to non-monetary things, I think it's about education, experience, mentoring, and giving people an ability to put themselves in a position to take on more responsibilities and to grow, even if it means growing beyond your company.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:56] I think also, they are invested when they do that. We're growing, so we hire staff and they don't always fit our culture, our ways. But we're here eight hours a day. I want everybody to fit, I want them to come to work. And if you're not going to fit here, I'll help you find a job where you will fit. It's okay. That's my take on it.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:23:25] The satisfaction surveys of both our employees and our customers tell us, when I was at the credit union, we had a 98% satisfaction rating from our staff. I had over 2000 staff at the end. To achieve that meant that I had to be a servant leader, and that on my to-do list every morning, I had to make sure that 50% of my to-do list items were about serving my internal customers, my staff. If I didn't have 50% of the items on my to-do list that were dedicated to doing something that was about improving culture or internal service or servant leadership, then I had to recalibrate my to-do list.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:24:14] What would be a couple of those things? Can you list them off for our listeners?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:24:19] In our case, it could be aligning the bonus program, it could be building the Emerging Young Leaders workshops, it could be simply auditing the HR manual with the HR department to make sure that every so often we're refreshing it. How are we validating our pay grades? Then of course, feedback. Addressing any feedback that we had received. Even when I had 500 employees, I did a personal handwritten birthday card to every single person in the company where I commented on something in their family, something about them personally, and took the time to get to know that. What I wanted to develop was a caring culture. Everybody's going to have a bad day or a bad run or a bad thing, and the value of your company and your culture is, will you care? Will you care about the person beside you sufficiently to be able to say, I'll pick up the pace today. I know someday you'll pick up the pace for me. I don't expect this all to go to Christmas dinner at each other's houses and holiday with each other, but I do expect us to have a culture where we truly care about one another and about each other's welfare development, how we're doing, to that level. I encourage that.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:25:59] As you get more employees from different backgrounds to different interests, that goes on and on. But as long as you respect and work with each other very well, you don't need to go for drinks after work. You don't need to be best friends.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:26:24] What we have to do as leaders is we have to understand that we've thought about something for a period of time, and we bring it into the workplace. To us, it's not change because it's our idea or it's something we've been envisioning. But to everybody we're talking to, it's change. How do you nurture an environment in which everybody's got to work through change? Everybody's got to work through those seven stages of transition. Some will get through it really quickly and some will take longer and need more support. We think it's a great idea, we don't see it as change because we've already assimilated the thought process and the vision. Everything we bring into the workplace is change, so you have to have a change management process. You have to have a transformational change understanding as to how you're entering this information, these ideas into the workplace. That's an important piece of being a leader, is understanding that everybody is going to react to change differently, and you're going to have to figure out where everybody is in those seven stages, because you've got to get everybody to the vision. You've got to get everybody to acceptance. For the seven stages, this morning if I said, I'm not going to do it this way, I'm going to come to your shop. I would have thought it was a wonderful idea, but right away you would have been going, this isn't how I do this.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:28:07] The first thing you would have done is you would have lost focus. You got shocked and confused. Then you would have said, maybe it won't happen, maybe he'll just do it the way I want it to. Denial, that's the second piece. Then you get into the pit, which is fear, anger, sadness. Why does he have to do it that way? Why did he think that was a good idea? This is stupid. Then you get into the letting go of it and say, maybe there's something here. Then you say, I can probably do this a bit. Maybe we can do half of it that way, Jeff. Then you get to, maybe this will work out pretty good. Then you get confident and you integrate it into the vision. Some of us can go right through it depending on the nature and type of change. If it was a massive change or much more impactful to an individual, then you've got to figure out, where is each person on this seven stages of transition and how can I coach them, support them, get them there? The Change Leader Roadmap taught me if you spend more time at the start, it takes way more time for transformational change. But if you spend the time at the start getting to the shared vision, understanding the impact on people, getting the team coalesced around the concepts, it takes a lot more time up front, but the implementation and execution is usually much more foolproof.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:29:47] Sometimes I feel, because we are evolving and we are growing at a fast rate, I have these ideas in my head and I have trouble portraying them to my team to get them on board. Then I often feel like I'm weighed down. Just let me go, I'm chomping at the bit.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:30:09] Or you default to tell. Defaulting to tell doesn't get any buy-in, it doesn't get any shared vision, it doesn't get your idea buffed up with some good ideas from the people who work with you, and it doesn't get any shared ownership.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:30:25] Interesting. Where is this Change Leader Roadmap?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:30:29] Change Leader Roadmap and the entire teachings of Dean and Linda. Doctor Dean Anderson and Linda Anderson, who put together the change leader roadmap, their company is called Being First and their website is just that, beingfirst.com. They are tremendous people. They are Being First Inc. out of Durango. I went and stayed at their house and learned an awful lot. If people go there, it's 'conscious change leadership' and all of their resources are there. They're a tremendous organization. The two of them have dedicated their life to conscious change leadership. I think if you're going to be a leader in the future, you have to be very adept at conscious change leadership, and you have to understand the difference between change process and transformational change leadership. Anybody can put a process in place and say, plug it into a project plan, but actually making sure that change transforms an organization and it actually is sustainable, that requires conscious change leadership. In Foresights, what we had to do, the foresight training was multiple weeks in a year of training, but it was about seeing processes separate from seeing systems. Then you had to see the internal and external dynamics, and ultimately you had to see consciously. Put all of that together in order to navigate and create breakthrough consulting.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:31:58] How does culture fall into all of that?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:32:00] Culture, as we know, is imperative to success. Culture is fragile. There's no such thing as 'we'll land there and then we're good for a period of time'. It's never done, never not done. Always evolving, always changing, just like you and I. You have to have inputs to your culture, and you have to have culture examples, and you have to reinforce positive culture. It's something you have to work on every day. When I look at my to-do list every day and I look at my servant leadership duties, at least half of those things have to be focused on internal customers, and probably 10% to 20% of those are on culture. When it comes to reinforcing your culture, in our case we're very transparent with our financial performance, our strategic plan, and how we're doing against the strategic plan. We're a privately held company and every single employee in this company knows how much we make, what the revenue is, what the sales are, what the profit is and they know how much I get paid. Every one of them. Every one of them knows that we're going to share 30%, approximately, of our after tax income with them as a bonus.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:33:31] That's different too, over the years before, numbers are so hush-hush. That's really changed over the years too.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:33:36] That's part of that respect and part of that 'I need to be included' and part of those core human needs that I identified emerging rapidly in trying to keep and attract the best people. They want to know what you stand for ethically, what you stand for morally, transparency in terms of your financial performance, and how are they sharing that? How can they influence it? At the end of the day, if they help us achieve financial success to where we can reinvest in the company and take dividends, what's their benefit? How do they grow?

Sharon DeKoning: [00:34:20] Does it matter how long they've been with you? How do you maintain the length of staff?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:34:24] In our case, everybody shares. Half of our bonus pool is given out because we achieved our corporate goals, what percentage of the corporate goals. The other half is on four key individual performance components. My goal has always been as it was at the credit union, as it was at all my companies, is that a bonus should be meaningful. It should compensate you for the extra miles you went over the course of the year. It should compensate you for the extra commitment you have, for that willingness to take a bullet for the team, so to speak. I don't think that should be a token. I think, at a minimum, the bonus pool should be at least a month of extra pay without a month of extra bills for you. If it can be two months, that means we performed really well.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:35:24] That's awesome.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:35:25] Our average bonus for our team runs in that area. That's what our staff can expect. Then they can go home and they can pay off a credit card, or they can put braces on a child, they can take a family trip, they can make a difference. It's not a token gesture, it means you are sharing in our success, and we recognize how valuable you are to that success and that binds them. This company has a turnover rate of less than 4% a year. When we bought the company in 2016 and took over, everybody that we wanted to stay with is still here nine years later.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:36:01] That's absolutely remarkable. Are there other ways that leaders could recognize a team besides the dollar value? Do you think that can go somewhere?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:36:08] Yeah, for sure. We try to celebrate and profile what we would term, or what one would think of, as model performance model behavior. We try to reinforce it in different ways. It can be catching people doing things right, it can be your coworkers catching you doing it right. Then we have reward programs for that. Where we think we have culture gaps, we try to put in suitable reward programs. They might be our own corporate promotional items that people get when they're identified, but they're celebrated in front of their peers. Their peers are usually bringing it forward. Everybody wants to feel liked, respected, included, it's part of those core human needs. The things that we can do to make sure that we have multiple feeds to those five core human needs is what will bind people to the organization.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:37:03] My brain is swimming and I have so many ideas. I just want to jump off this now and start incorporating them. My team will be like, here we go again.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:37:15] What we have to remember is that small groups of really motivated people can achieve amazing success. Probably the biggest message I can leave you with, as a leader we have to create that, not just a caring culture, but one that they know it's okay to fail. If you were really trying to achieve the results, if you did everything within your power, if you had all of our best interests at heart and we fell short, that's okay.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:37:49] As long as you learn from it.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:37:51] Because in falling short, we've made part of the journey. We can pick that journey up and we can clean it up and we can make the rest of the journey together, and it will be that much more. Anytime you've been knocked down, anytime you've been beaten up, anytime you've bled a little, when you actually won in the end, it was that much sweeter.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:38:17] I always say pick yourself up, wipe yourself off and try it again.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:38:21] When our teams think back at success, whether that be Hockey Day in Canada that I chaired in 2014, of course one of the most admired and watched hockey days in history to this day. Then the Astec safety challenge, which you've been a big part of, what it's done and what it's created for our city. These are major events, but the people I had dinner with, the organizing committee, just last week of the Astec Safety Challenge, every single person wants to be on the committee next year.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:39:05] Wow, that's amazing. It's hard to get volunteers.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:39:08] That just tells me that people want to be around good feelings and success, and they want to be recognized. If you share that recognition and if you include them in that recognition, and if they get that feeling, that's that 'it'. We had it, these people all want to be on the committee again next year, they don't want anybody to take their spot. They did a ton of work, these people.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:39:36] It boils down to 'watch your circle'. It's important for that circle.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:39:41] That's leadership in my mind. My daughter, Kate, has learned it well. She's ready to take the pebble from my hand on a lot of fronts and run with it. That's gratifying. When you see people succeeding and you see them excited about success and you see them adopting some of the things that you've taught them, at my age, that's all I have to give back. My responsibility, now, is not to take this to my grave, it's to share it. It's to provide, to watch and really get excited. Sitting at the back of the room like a proud father or grandfather, watching these people hit it out of the park. There's no better feeling than watching my daughter succeed on the Astec safety challenge and turning it into the worldwide event that it is. Not just my daughter, but Nicole Reiniger and Megan Bodine and Cindy. All people that have worked with me, alongside me in different capacities. Nicole Reiniger has worked with me at the credit union, she worked at the city of Lloydminster with me, and now she works at Musgraves, and now she's on this committee and leads the junior curling part and the volunteers. These people are exceptional. That's the fun part now, at my age. I hope that I can pass along more life lessons. I absolutely love the chance to chat with you, and I think the work that you're doing in the community, whether it be BNI, your own company, just your profile, the things you're committed to, I think people do sit back and say, how does she do it, too. You are admired as a leader.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:41:28] Thank you. I learn every day and it's my team that makes me learn. One last question before I sign off with you, what advice do you have for these up and coming leaders? What's your core advice for them?

Jeff Mulligan: [00:41:44] Be bold.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:41:44] I like that.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:41:46] I said to one of my staff the other day, we were doing the bonus discussions and raise discussions. I said, if I was 35 years old and in your shoes right now. For every two of me leaving the workplace in the baby boom, and I'm the end of the baby boom born in '59, there was only one coming in. Great people are going to be much easier to identify in the future, but they're going to be called on to do much more. I say, be bold. If you think you've got it in you, be bold. Step up, don't be afraid to fail, don't be afraid to be criticized. You will get criticized as a leader much more than 30 years ago. Today, people will attack you on social media. They will write crazy stuff about you. They'll say this, they'll say that. You can sit in front of a keyboard as a 35 year old loser in your parents' basement and type whatever the hell you want in social media, anonymously. That's unfortunately how the coffee shop of the 1990s has evolved. In the coffee shop, they went and said their stuff, and then they went back to work and it was forgotten. Now it lives on forever and people write about it and talk about it forever. But the reality is that you have to be prepared to take those bruises and take those hits, because successful people and leaders, it's easier for people to try and pull you down than pull themselves up. And that's the bottom line.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:43:28] I've run into people that say, I'd never go into politics. Unfortunately, we don't attract the best people to politics anymore and there's a reason. It's that social media attack, it's that kind of stuff. It's a shame, because I can tell you that the work that I did as a politician was some of the most gratifying times in my life. The nonsense around the outside was not. I just think that the generation of 35 year olds and 40 year olds, be bold, be confident in yourself. Be open to learning, but be bold. We need that leadership. We need to hand that ball to some capable leaders who want to excel. I'm sure that there's a group that will come on and they will take the world to places that I can't even imagine. They'll take our business, even here, to places I can't imagine. Be bold and be ready to get bruised up a little bit. People take shots. I have found that so many people in the culture we have today in the world, they think if they can bring you down with a comment, they don't have to bring themselves up and perform. That's a shame. As a leader, you've got to be able to look past that.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:45:04] I'm a little bit concerned, because you talked about the five, secure, inclusion, control, respect, confidence. Unfortunately a lot of the generation now, we have to cater to that. It's not general to them.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:45:24] Leaders are going to have to understand how they can lead three different generations in the workplace simultaneously. We used to have two, and that was hard enough. Now you quite often have three and sometimes four generations in one workplace, and they all are led by different things. They're all motivated by different things. You can't motivate with one brush anymore. The art of leadership across multiple generations is probably the single greatest challenge of the future.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:46:05] I think so too. When I was in the workforce, my mom and dad always said, if you're sweeping the floor, sweep it good. Do it right, and work your way up. It's a little bit different now.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:46:22] It's a different world. I look at Ken Kay, maybe one of the greatest leaders of all time in our city at Agland, the owner. He started sweeping the floors at Agland and ultimately became the owner. When you go into the boardroom at Agland, which now has a different name because they just merged, but when you go in there, John Deere doesn't give out awards very easily. When you're a John Deere rep, go into their boardroom. They had 25 of 27 years where they won the Top Dealer award, and that was Ken Kay. Him and Mr. Nelson taught me more about leadership and more about how to treat people and how to influence in a positive way than anybody I know.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:47:21] Leaders out there, be bold, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, go again.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:47:28] Put your body armor on and get out there and make a difference.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:47:36] Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeff. I really appreciate it. To our listeners, reach out to Jeff. If you have any questions on mentorship or leadership, I'm sure he's just a call away.

Jeff Mulligan: [00:49:09] It was a pleasure.