Episode 1- Leadership for Disrupting the Status Quo with Randy Cadieux

Kicking Boxes Podcast|Become a Better Leader with Disruptive Leadership Lessons|Interviews with Thought Leaders Who are Disrupting the Status Quo in Business and Industry to Make the World a Better Place

Randy Cadieux is the Founder of V-Speed, LLC, a leadership, resilience, and team performance consulting and coaching company and is also the Program Manager and an Instructor for the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Master of Engineering in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management program. Randy is a 20-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps. His primary occupational specialty was as a KC-130 Hercules pilot and he had numerous other leadership roles in the areas of aviation, operations, crew performance, and safety. Randy holds a Master of Engineering in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is the author of the book Team Leadership in High-Hazard Environments. My name is Randy Cadieux and I want to welcome you to V-Speed’s Kicking boxes podcast where we focus on delivering tremendous value and knowledge to you on the subjects can help to influence your disruptive leadership efforts. I want to take this time to explain a few things, which should help set the stage for your future listening. I will describe some things to help you get an idea of what to expect from the show, including the Kicking boxes name and meaning, the origins of V-Speed, LLC and the V-SpeedMedia brand and what we try to do, the types of guests we have on the show, and the overall outcomes I hope you will experience as benefits for listening to the show. Description of V-Speed’s Kicking boxes podcast: As you may know I was in the Marine Corps for 20 years. Early in my career I was influenced by a very interesting general officer who used to have a saying. He would say that the way to lead is to get out from behind your desk and go kick boxes. This was a metaphor for getting out into the field, asking questions of front line personnel, and learning from them about their needs and ideas for improving effectiveness and efficiency. I think from a disruptive leadership standpoint this is an area that can continue to be exploited. If leaders really want to disrupt the status quo then they need to take time to get away from their desks and get out into the field or onto the production floor, or wherever then need to be to truly engage with their workforce. After all, without workers, leaders wouldn’t have a job and even if someone is in a position with no direct reports they still need to influence people from a leadership standpoint. So, even if you don’t have direct reports don’t think that you can’t be a leader! Before we get into the description of the podcast, let me tell you a bit about me, so you understand a bit of my perspective and hopefully this will give you some context related to the questions I ask my guests and to some of the dialogue we have: -20 years USMC veteran, experience on crew served aircraft, Instructor Pilot, operations, safety, Crew Resource Management, human performance. Now I am the founder and a consultant for V-Speed, LLC where we focus on helping organizations achieve operational excellence using leadership, resilience, and human performance approaches to help clients solve complex problems. -I hold a Master of Engineering in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management (ASEM) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I am also the ASEM Program Manager and a faculty instructor. I teach two courses in that program. One focuses on hazard analysis and system safety engineering and the other focuses on organizational resilience/resilience engineering and transformational leadership. You will probably notice that I relate a lot of discussions back to safety and resilience. This doesn’t mean I am trying to simply seek out compliance with regulations, but to seek discussions about ways organizations can identify and control risk so their businesses can thrive, so they can protect their most important assets (their people) and humans are the most important part of any system so the organization should work to maximize their chances for successful performance. So I seek out leaders to interview in multiple fields to find out how they are doing this, and how they are disrupting the status quo when it comes to outdated or outmoded leadership approaches. Additionally, risk can take many forms and have many impacts, so I try to find guests who can talk about how they can exploit risks for positive business results as well as controlling risk to reduce the likelihood of failure. V-SpeedMedia background: V-SpeedMedia is a brand within the company V-Speed, LLC, which is a company I founded back in 2010. V-Speed focuses on helping organizations improve leadership, safety, resilience, and human and team performance with the end goal of seeing better results in terms of productivity, safety, reliability and/or quality, depending on the specific goals of the client. The overall goal may be thought of as Operational Excellence. V-SpeedMedia as a brand At V-SpeedMedia specifically, it is my hope that we can educate and inspire through the power of storytelling to help people at multiple levels within an organization to achieve understanding and alignment of varying perspectives. There is so often a gap between perspectives at multiple levels within organizations and when this gap is allowed to remain and no effort is made for different levels from the top to the bottom to understand each other it is unlikely that an organization will achieve its best results. With V-SpeedMedia I hope to show people that it is possible to understand each other’s perspectives and will try to incorporate storytelling to help with that journey. I may refer to listeners from time to time as members of the V-Speed Squadron or as V-Speed Squadron mates. A squadron is the smallest unit within military aviation and by referring to listeners as squadron mates it is a way to help build a tribe of loyal listeners who are interested in disruptive leadership and dramatically improving human, team, and organizational performance across multiple areas, including operations/production, safety, reliability, and quality. If you go to either V-Speedsafety.com or V-Speedmedia.com and look closely at either logo you will notice a little tiny airplane over the “EE” in the word “Speed.” The term V-Speed is an aviation term related to operational performance and safety speeds and is a way to bring in my aviation background and heritage into what we do at V-Speed and V-SpeedMedia. Types of guests I like to bring on the show: I will be interviewing guests from around the country and the world in some cases who are experts in their field. They may come from backgrounds in safety, resilience, human performance, operations, reliability, and/or quality and from industries such as manufacturing, mining, consulting, first responders, finance, military, mining, oil and gas, and many other fields. Most of these guests have actual boots on ground experience working with front line workers and their experience is priceless. Many of their backgrounds and experiences may not ostensibly seem to directly relate to your specific industry, but I really believe if you listen to their stories you will find value from their experiences. As a side note, if after listening to several of the shows you feel you would be a good candidate as a guest, please reach out to me using the contact form at V-SpeedMedia.com Q&A Format: I will generally try to stick to a format that involves around 10-11 questions. I do this to help you as a listener and loyal V-Speed Squadron mate to know what to expect. Here are the questions: 1. Okay, we’ve heard your formal bio, but tell us what makes you tick, what motivates you, what inspires you, or generally why you do what you do. 1A. What got you interested in that? 2. Tell us about your company/role 3. Tell us about your current work or projects that interest you. 4. What was the biggest moment in your career where you had an “aha moment” about leadership, organizational resilience, reliability, safety, or a similar area? 4A. How did that moment shape your outlook on the future? 5. What’s next in terms of projects or areas of interest you want to explore? 6. What area in leadership, organizational development, or industry do you think needs disruption and why? 7. If you could be granted one wish for leadership or organizational change/development what would it be? 8. Can you recommend any books for our listeners and why would you recommend these in particular? 9. How can our listeners find out more about you and what you do, or how can they contact you? Sometimes we my go off script if I feel it will benefit the listeners, but will generally try to stay organized around these questions. In addition to the guests, I may alternate certain shows where I discuss topics alone which I think are important to you and which may add value to your leadership efforts. Podcast frequency: I will do my best to try to have one show per week, but if that changes I will try to inform listeners who subscribe to my email newsletter. Please rate, and review this podcast and please subscribe to my newsletter. You can subscribe at V-SpeedMedia.com or V-Speedsafety.com (spell out). Lastly, thanks so much for being a loyal listener and a V-Speed Squadron mate. My hope is that this show will provide you with ideas, stories, and lessons-learned from some outstanding leaders in their fields so that you can apply some of these lessons in your organization. Ultimately my hope is that you will be able to make your organization a better place and in the process help to make the world a better place where we can all thrive. Thanks again, and let’s go kick some boxes! Please click here or go to the link to sign up for our newsletter: www.v-speedsafety.com/email-subscription/ Contact: www.v-speedsafety.com www.v-speedmedia.com