Welcome to Ask Dr. Change. I’m Dr. Linda Ackerman. Anderson. I’m happy to have you join me today to explore how to seriously up level your leadership and consulting to transformational changes.

All through conscious change, leadership. Welcome. Today’s episode is a special opportunity for me. I’m here with my dear friend and colleague, Joe Rafter.

Joe is the group client partner for Cap Gemini and also the founder and CEO of the National Football Alliance. We’re going to hear about the Football Alliance a little bit later on. Joe, so happy and thankful to have you here with me today. Tell us a little bit more about yourself before we dive in.

Likewise, Linda. When you invited me to be on here, it’s it’s a gift to spend this time with you, especially having worked so closely together for so many years. So many years ago. So, yeah, I’m born and raised in Philadelphia, in the suburbs.

I’m I’m really content wise. I’m a strategy execution guy. So I’ve done a lot of work with C-suites in many different industries, both large and small, helping them to reshape their business model using technology. Some people call that transformation.

I try and steer clear from that term because that word means so many different things to so many different people. I’ve worked all over the world, five continents and I just what I’ve learned in those travels are that technology can do anything we want it to do. We can always get the budget if we have the business case. But really, at the end of the day, why projects, programs, companies, teams fail is because of unhealthy human dynamics in their environment, which is frankly what led me to you guys in the first place a long time ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Say more about that. What? What what was jumping out at you that got you into the change leadership world?

So I. I was in my early thirties. I was working for IBM and I worked all over the world and gotten involved. And I really made a career at IBM in turning around troubled situations by on a parachuted in smoke, jumping in to try and fix situations.

And I was sent to Australia to be a chief engineer on a the largest transformation program in the world at the time. And that was a very, very difficult experience. Personally, professionally, I learned so much when it came back from that experience. I thought to myself that that’s if that is how big large transformations go.

And IBM can’t make it work successfully because it wasn’t necessarily a successful project in the brass ring. You know, the definition of what good looks like, what great looks like was still out there. And so I left IBM and I went out on my own, and I ended up I took a job with a little company called Yellow Book High and a little company little company called Yellow Book, which was an independent Yellow Pages firm. And they were losing a ton of market share to search engines.

And so they hired me as an AVP of change management. And so I joined and I started exploring like any good consultant would. What is this topic of change management? Let me let me really kind of pour myself into it and it came across your book as well as others, but your book really spoke to me from a a content concept theory in Beyond Change Management.

But then the roadmap for me, I’m a I’m a program manager at heart. And so I looked at the roadmap. I saw a work breakdown structure and I went, okay, I can see, you know, a view of how to execute change management. So it really it I found it very, very helpful, very insightful.

And that’s when I started becoming, I’ll say, you know, a lay practitioner of of your work. And then, of course, when I went to Jeanie is when we really had a chance to roll up our sleeves together. Yeah. Yeah.

So tell us a little bit about your experience at PPG Yanni, what you were attempting to do there to establish change leadership across the company? Right on, Sure. So I was brought in to launch a new enterprise change management function. They call it change management.

I called it change leadership because I truly believe that change needs to be led. Then there’s an aspect of managing change, making sure that things land. But the concept of leading it was really why I was brought in. I had no project responsibilities.

I wasn’t a project manager, I wasn’t a process analyst, I wasn’t a solution architect, which are three jobs I’ve done in my past, my full time job was to help leaders show up differently and help them drive enthusiastic adoption of digital technologies across electric gas transmission distribution across that particular firm. We were basically digitizing the grid. And so it was it was all coaching, all guidance advisory around how to how to help leaders truly lead lead change and develop change strategies so they could implement and achieve the things that they wanted to in their specific areas of the business.

Yeah, fabulous. It was a very intensive time of work, Both the projects coming at you, there were more projects than your folks could handle, which was a statement of the value you they were delivering. And at Joe, I think we ended up training about 750 people, both the consultants, the project managers, project teams, project leaders in Change Conscious Change leadership, which was a statement of how many managers really wanted your group’s help as a statement there. Yeah, I wanted to ask you.

Yeah, go. I was just yeah, we, I mean, we, we caught lightning in a bottle. Yeah, we there was an organization that was starving for change, IQ development change IQ capability. How do I raise how can I be better at this at implementing the change?

I can write the code, I can test it, whether it was SFP or whether it was a third party piece of software that was out in the field where there was an iPad application. That technology we could do that. But but what was what where the company needed help was how do I get a diverse set of stakeholders to actually use the technology in an environment that was in some cases had high trust, in other cases didn’t have the trust that it needed to actually land the adoption. And so we got involved in a lot of, you know, all the thorny sides of the people aspects of change.

Yeah. So from that standpoint and from your experience through today, how would you define successful change leadership? What’s it look like? How do you know you’ve achieved it?

And so big question, what I think change leadership is inspiring others to believe and become more than they are today. I believe change leadership is inspiring others to, number one, believe. I in my mind, believe I’m we are capable of something better. And then to go and activate that in the market, whether that’s deploying a new iPad application to 5000 linemen in a utility or whether that’s frankly defeating a bill to ban youth tackle football in the state of California, either one of those, which was my experience that led me to the National Football Alliance.

Either one of those, it’s you have to inspire others to become a bigger version of themselves. Awesome. Awesome. I remember conversations we would have about your ability to up level other people’s thinking so they could see more, see more deeply, see longer, which is an enactment of what you’re talking about to help people see there’s something bigger, more better that we can go after once we see it.

Yeah. And so it’s more than just, you know, it’s more than just training people on the new SRP model, right? I mean, I had said you I’ve had conversations over my entire career in the change space where I say to leaders, So let me get this straight. How many what percentage of people were trained?

100%. Okay. And what’s the feedback on the training? It was excellent. They loved it. Okay.

And what’s the adoption rate? 60%. Okay. So what? Where is the guy? Yeah. So so, you know, there’s a lot of proactive and reactive strategies that, you know, the people in this practice are, you know, apply.

But that that’s that’s the telling factor is really it’s all about the adoption and the uptake because if you don’t get the adoption of the technology, you don’t get the business value for sure. You know, the difference between installation and full realization of what the the outcome needs to be. Yeah. You’ve been after all this time.

Yeah. I wanted to ask you, what advice do you have for leaders today who are on the path to beginning to see more, realize they need more. What advice do you have for leaders today? So for for a leader who is undergoing some significant ambition or who is taking on is maybe at the mercy of a significant disruption.

Yeah. First, you have to master yourself. You have to get focused on your own leadership style and how you land on others. And it’s I think it’s a hard thing for people to get their head around.

But it’s my lived and learned experience that the harder I work on my leadership style or my ability to influence others, to want to be more and then go activate it, the better I become an instrument for that change. The more other people start running through walls for me and with me, as opposed to me pushing people to run through walls themselves. Right. So that’s why I think this this element of inspiration is really important and like a really good question to ask leaders as it.

So if there’s a change practitioner in the audience here. Right. Which I’m sure there are. Like, when’s the last time the leader did something inspiring, inspiring to their people?

And I’m not talking about like, you know, quarterly awards, You know, what’s when’s the last time somebody actually got in front of the team and declared a call to action that maybe is bigger than what might be apparent in front? I’ll give you an example. When we when we had those training classes at PPG, when we opened up, one of the things I used to ask is, you know, what do we do for a living here? And people raise their hand.

They say, you know, we we produce electricity and we distribute gas and we fix transformers or power lines and keep the energy, keep tricity honest. Yes, all those things. So but I, I, I would encourage you to look at it a little differently. We help babies get born in hospitals.

We keep people up. We keep people alive because the machines that they’re on in the hospital are powered by the electricity that we create. We keep social order as utility company because if you lose electricity, it’s like, you know, it can become really, really bad. So finding that higher calling as a leader and helping people see that higher calling within the context of the work that they’re doing in any industry I’m working, I’m currently spending a lot of time in the oil and gas business.

Right. So sustainability is a big part of of our call to action. Now. I’m still deploying ICP.

I’m still managing databases. I’m still helping my client implement technology. But for what? The reason really is to help create a more sustainable planet.

Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. And how about advice for consultants? How we go about influencing our clients, our organizations, our leaders.

So I learned this the hard way. I think the most important thing and I learned it as a really in the change space, you have to speak your truth, especially truth to power. Yeah. And I had some conversations in my time my entire career, including several of PGD, where I had to speak truth to power.

And it it was a difficult conversation. But I look back on those conversations that I take a lot of pride right in what I said, how I said it, how I held myself and there’s some conversations I’ve had in my life where I’ve spoken truth to power and I and I did a really bad job of it, really. And so there’s three ways I like to describe how people need to speak. Speak truth to power.

Yeah. Yes. The first one is unarguably speak with language and data and facts that are that are not able to be argued with and in a in a manner that you’re not fighting, you’re not in an argument. It’s just speaking your truth calmly, unarguably, second, speak unambiguously, use very clear language that leaves the audience in a place where there’s no guessing.

What did he really mean by that? Yeah, stay away from that kind of communication and check with check with the listener. Does that make sense? It’s one of the things I say all the time.

So I think it should be read Not Blue. Does that make sense? Right. And then lastly, speak unapologetically.

There’s no reason to apologize for having your opinion. Right? I’ve learned, and I am deeply committed to the reality that you’re 100% accurate with your perspective. It’s yours.

You own it, it’s yours, it’s yours. So if you think the right answer is read not blue, you should speak it and don’t apologize for it. As a poet, if you and if you feel yourself going to apologize, the hack that I offer folks is don’t apologize. Thank them for the opportunity to share your point of view.

If you go, Hey, I think it’s red, not blue. And I’m sorry that you think it’s blue. Let’s say that it’s I think it’s red, not blue. And I appreciate the opportunity to share my opinion.

It’s a great hack to avoid that giving up of your of your power. Awesome. Awesome. What other changes?

Really helpful advice for consultants. And I’m curious, as you’ve grown in your career, what other changes have taken place for you about your own approach? I mean, you just gave three great examples there. What else?

How have you seen yourself evolve through this work? So, you know, if I go back to, you know, my I’ll say my mid-career, maybe it was early, my you know, my early thirties, mid thirties. I was so I was reactive. So I’m a lifelong football player.

I played in grade school, high school in college. Okay. I was the defensive end. My job was to sack the quarterback.

So conflict, no problem. You want to get into conflict? No problem. Let’s roll up our sleeves.

Let’s. Let’s go. And I learned that that approach did not serve me very well. As I got further into my professional career.

Yeah. And so I made some mistakes. I was I was more than willing to take on conflict. Maybe a little too eager, as I’m really comfortable with it.

And so what I’ve learned over time that I’ll say that through my mistakes and through my own journey around personal mastery of my own leadership style is to move from reaction to response. And the way I do that is I find the pause. I if I feel myself in a reaction where somebody says something and know in my head I’m gone, well, that’s bogus. Or if I if I come coming across judgmental in my head, a pause a second try and wonder why would they have that point of view?

They’re 100% accurate with their point of view. That’s for and what could be my response as opposed to an emotional reaction? Yeah, it’s what it takes. That’s one of the techniques I use.

The other one, I’ll just take a drink of water or maybe shift in my chair a little bit to get out of my head for a second. That’s another technique that I found is useful. How about the one breath? One breath?

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the part, right? That’s the part. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can pause with breath, pause with the drink, pause with the sitting.

Right, right. But yeah, yeah. Maybe getting less reactive and more responsive where I can intelligently respond. Cognitively.

Emotionally respond. Right. Yeah. The last thing I would say is, and because I say this out of my teens, I want us to lead in a way where our head, heart and hands are all connected nice.

And I find I’m sure I’m sure your audience will have experienced people who are very, very cognitively oriented, no heart, no heads. So they’re the people who are always the smartest people in the room. They say everything, but they don’t actually ever do anything and don’t understand how their comment lands on others. And so I always like to have the head, the heart.

What do I know? How does it feel? What can I do about it in a line sense? I find that to be helpful and absolutely beautiful.

That’s one reason why you’re such a great coach. Good. So what’s next for you, Joel? You’re deeply enmeshed in the fabulous work that you’re currently doing.

What do you think is next for you? So football is my next horizon. I am. So I when I was in California, I founded the California Football Alliance and I and two others coauthored the first youth youth tackle football safety law in the country after defeating a ban to build a bill to ban the sport.

ESPN wrote about it. It’s the only safe youth safety law, football safety law in the country. I moved out of California. I’m back in Philadelphia now, and so that organization is left to my California colleagues.

But I’ve launched the National Football Alliance, which is a super structure to bring together the very best of football across the country, to try and aggregate and optimize as much as we can where we can. We’re nonprofit. We are a volunteer organization right now. But ultimately, you know, I’m I’m entering here, you can see by my gray hairs, I’m entering my third chapter in life at some point here somewhere in the next 5 to 10 years.

And so I’m preparing for that. In the meantime, you know, I coach high school football now, and I do this because this I’ve seen this sport change people’s lives, lives of men like me, grown men who are fathers and five and six and seven year olds in all four corners of our country. And so this sport, the sport’s not for everyone, but for those that it’s for it’s it’s deeply meaningful and life changing. And so, yeah, I I’m the self-proclaimed greatest advocate for American football in the country.

And so the National Football Alliance is a new platform that I and several other colleagues are building. National football and you can go learn about what we’re doing with fundraising and helping to honor, improve and advance the sport. So honor improving, advance the sport. This is an incredible transformation.

I mean, it really is, you know, to call it what you’re attempting to do, it’s a transformation. And so I’m curious about your strategy for taking on this as a transformation. Great question. So first and foremost, I, I need to be credible.

And so I think my background in the sport, 27, 28 years as a player coach is one piece I built a phenomenal team. I have a Chiefs football officer. I spent 25 years in power. Five football coaching, works with the NFL teams.

I was a remarkable guy. John Ragan. I have others. I have a chief medical officer.

There’s a neuropsychologist out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the best neurology organization in the country, Alicia TurboTax, Dr. Alicia Trowbridge. And I’ve assembled others. I have Zach Ertz is mom, Lisa Ertz is is our chief engagement officer.

So I brought people together from many diverse backgrounds who care about the sport authentically and what it what it offers are those that play it. We’re also coming out with the podcast, so we will have a podcast starting in November. It’ll be John and one of the guys from California, Steve and I, and it’s going to be an interesting podcast. It’ll be a, it’ll be like a mash up of a bunch of them.

It’ll be kind of like a TED talk, but it’ll be much more, much more fun and jovial and down to earth. A little more blue collar than that, I think. We’re also coming to market in in 2025 with our first product. I’m not ready to reveal what that product is yet, but we are going to have a product to offer out to the market.

You’ll be able to buy from the National Football Alliance. That’s going to strike right at the center of honor and improving, advancing. We really want to transform the sport, particularly at the youth and high school level in a medically informed way. Beautiful.

Yeah, beautiful. So I hear strategy, I hear staffing with capability, I hear diverse orientation. So you’re looking at it from all perspectives, seeing broadly, seeing deeply, seeing long distance. I hear about, you know, engaging others so that they to become believers.

You talked about that earlier and coming out with a service and a product at some point for people to get their hands on what this is about and the podcast for communications to engage others in it. So I’m, I’m reading back to you what I’ve heard in terms of transformational strategy, given how huge a transformation this this particular effort is. And also as a great lifelong football fan, I deeply appreciate it. Even though my teams are a little iffy this year, I do want to.

So that is absolutely awesome. Joe So you using your career’s learnings to actually accomplish something that will make a huge difference in this particular sector of society? Yeah, it really, really beautiful. It’s I mean, we’ve all sat around with the video call and talked about this as a leadership team.

I mean, like people who join this team. And again, you can see it on our website. We are advisory, we’ve an advisory board. So I have four people who I like and trust.

One’s a former coach of mine, Chris Lippold, one coached in my high school and is a former CEO of TD Ameritrade, Joe Moglia. He coached at the college level as well. Just a remarkable man. A remarkable man.

Merrill Hodge, former Pittsburgh Steeler who’s had his own journey in the sport. And then Joe Gilbert, who’s the founder of the American Youth Football Organization, the largest useful organization in the world. We’re doing this for purpose. Well, part of this is part of us creating a legacy.

Leaving something behind that’s that’s bigger and better than ourselves. Absolutely. So that future generations can benefit from the sport. So one of the good things I gleaned from that is, as you say, it’s about purpose.

So any transformation has to be fueled by purpose, not just the numbers, not just, you know, the percentages, but purpose. It’s the it’s the heart element that you were talking about. And then having a vehicle for the hands to actually play in it. Because clearly the cognitive your head, you’ve created an awesome strategy and an awesome team and so driven by purpose it’s very it’s very moving and and everybody ought to take from what you’ve said, what is the purpose of the work that they’re actually currently engaged in and how to spread that, how to make a critical mass of purpose around the work that they’re doing.

Yeah, I, I really like, I like starting with the why, right? Yeah. Yeah, right. When I run when I ran news organizations, I used to have a football coaches clinic in my own organization every year.

And the first question I asked all the coaches is why are you here? Yeah, there’s 30 guys and some grant and some and some girls in a room volunteering to spend, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week on a football field when they already have other jobs and other elements or license families. Why are you here? And that that tended to lock people in.

And and when things got hectic later in the season, maybe you weren’t winning as much or maybe you had a bad play. I would try and remind people why they why they’re on the sidelines coaching. Right. Keep that.

Why in in mind? Because it’s easy to lose sight of that when schedules are late, when results don’t happen the way that we want them to. But bringing people back to the why, particularly as a leader, I think is is necessary at times. Yeah.

Joe, my impression of you always through all the decades of knowing you, has always been you’re an emotional guy. But I don’t mean emotional like, you know, emotional. I mean, you help people tap into what’s important to them and why things are needed in our world to make things better. You’ve always tapped that particular channel in what you’ve done, no matter how technical or how organizational it is.

There’s always that element in how you proceed. It just and it gives permission for others to feel the importance of what they’re doing. Melinda That’s high praise. Thank you very much.

I’m humbled by your comments and yeah, and I it’s true. Yeah. I want to ask you to share a little bit about something you, you shared with me about your unscripted gathering at Camp Gemini as a culture changing strategy. I think that would be really informative for our audience.

Yeah. Yeah. I love unscripted. So when I was hired in a Cap Gemini, I was based in San Francisco and I was asked to be a part of the West Coast Engagement Board.

And so we were sitting in a meeting once who said, So what are we how are we going to gauge our, you know, 300 people out on the West Coast or whatever it was? I said, I want to host a one hour show each month and it’s going to have no PowerPoint presentations. It’s going to be unscripted. It’s we’re just going to have guests in and we’re going to talk.

And people like what? How is it going to work? I said, Just go with me on this. Three years later, we’ve run the show.

I don’t know. We normally take off in December, so we have something like, you know, 30, 30 different episodes. We started off with some color. You know, our first episode in August was a color commentary on high tech industry.

It turned into the gentleman who I was interviewing was is originally from is a Frenchman, and we ended up talking about his top ten favorite bottles of wine, and he published a list of his favorite wines. We’ve played tabletop games. I pull out a bunch of cards and I ask questions and people engage. I’ve had my African-American friends on in February to talk about and celebrate Black History Month and explore what does it mean to be an African-American in our country these days?

I’ve done the same in March for International Women’s Day. I’ve had panels of of our own women, as well as clients, talking about what it’s like to be female and a leader in, you know, in technology. Last month, I hosted a conversation on healthy masculinity. And what are what is it?

What are what are what is my guys like me? What is our job? What is our responsibility and accountability in the area of DNA. So it’s it’s a blast and it’s you would not believe like the list of topics because we we ask our audience for topics.

They sent me the list last week. It’s all it’s how do I how do I engage emotionally? How do I deal with conflict is all skills that we’re talking about in this change leadership space, right? Mastery of self and relating and creating connection with others.

I’ve had people on the call. They say I’ve never been on. I’ve been in business 30 years and this is my first call and Cap Gemini and Unscripted. I’ve never seen an experience like this in my life.

It’s an authentic dialog where we explore topics and there’s an audience and we raise hands and there’s lots of conversation and no PowerPoint slides, which I think is awesome. How do you feel after three years that it has altered the culture because it began as a culture strategy, So you’re familiar, I’m sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with, you know, the shirtless dancing guy. You know, these are my first followers, right? And so we are building a community of people who are in wonder around exploring each other’s points of views on topics.

But there is no one smartest, smartest person on the call anymore, right? Sometimes we have a powerful speaker, we talk about things, but we really don’t do a lot of that. We really we’re creating connection. And what’s happening is people from different practices, different accounts, different backgrounds, different countries who don’t have a chance to work with each other, have a chance to experience each other in this call right fast.

So that that’s really what we’re doing is we’re kind of cutting we’re cutting horizontally across the company in many different vectors. What I do for a living, my management structure, the country I’m in, the client I work for. And so people are getting a nice cross-section of our organization being able to see a, you know, a broader Capgemini. Yeah.

And you mentioned a really important word there, again, reflective of who you are, and that is creating connection in ways that are different than what can you do for me and what’s your skill and what’s my skill or my knowledge base of your knowledge base, you’re creating connection at an entirely different level of human beings who are all working really hard on behalf of their jobs, but feeling each other in various topics of, great importance to them, and just seeing you being and hearing another person give their perspective and having that perspective appreciated, recognized. Right. So

there’s there’s a lot of vulnerability in the conversation and, you know, the connection piece, I mean, I think our job as leaders is just to create connection. And every single one of us are human. So if we can find ways through conversations, games, exploring topics, having, you know, including humor along the way, we can do those things to create connection, then you’re going to great you’re you create a great experience for people and people want to be a part of those great experiences. More beautiful, really beautiful.

But Joe, this has been absolutely fantastic. You’re such a unique human being. I mean, how you’ve delved into so many different arenas in your life? And as a father of three boys and wonderful wife, the whole idea of, you know, appropriate masculinity is just, wow, you know, that’s powerhouse, really, really great.

So last thoughts that you’d like to share with audience remaining at bits of advice or guidance Wisdom. So as a of drained a couple of things in the call. Speaking truth to power creating connection, I’ll say this you just asserted that I’m a unique individual. That’s 100% true of all of us, right?

And there was a point there was a point in my life where I always felt unique. And I still to this day, I definitely feel unique. Sometimes I feel different. Different being a negative perspective of that.

Yeah, Sometimes I feel it, Sometimes I feel separated because of my uniqueness. And I’m probably not the only person who feels that way. So I think at the end of the day, it really does come down to, you know, really striving to be the best version of yourself. Nobody else like you in the whole world, ever in the history of mankind.

And so you might as well be the best version of yourself that you can. And embrace your uniqueness and show the world what you’re capable of and do what I like to refer to as, you know, I want to see you shine. I really want to see other people shine for the unique value and beauty that they possess. Coaches, words.

Coaches were just really awesome. Joey, thank you so much for spending this time with me and for being in my life all these decades. You’re you are a gift. You absolutely are a gift.

I really appreciate this time with you. Well, then I can’t. Thank you. Indeed enough. You your your work that you’ve put out in the universe I latched on to at the moment.

I read it, and it’s made a big difference in my life. You helped me tap into a lot of the things I’m sharing here today. I still take I still take ownership and pride for it. But I will also be deeply grateful to you and for the work we’ve done together.

And I miss working with you both. And so as it’s great to be here, beautiful. Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much.

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