Lindsey Pfeifer:

An organization is only as fearless as the leaders running it. The vision, the plan, the culture, it all flows downhill. If the top is unclear, hesitant, or misaligned, every single person below it feels it. I'm Lindsey Pfeifer, the director of client management at ICE Mortgage Technology, and I'm really excited about our guest today who has spent her career helping leaders understand just that. Carey knows what it takes to perform under pressure. She's one of the first female of 14 Tomcat fighter pilots in the US Navy, flying missions worldwide and one of the most demanding environments on earth. Since leaving the Navy, she's translated those lessons into the boardroom helping Fortune 500 leaders and organizations perform at their peak. She's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, a Hall of Fame speaker, and someone I am personally thrilled to have back to have this discussion today.

Hi, Carey. Thank you so much for joining us. It's so great to speak with you again. I feel like we had so much left to discuss and that this is the perfect continuation of that conversation.

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh, Lindsey, thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be here today.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

So to catch some of our listeners up, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carey a couple of weeks ago at the ICE Mortgage Technology's annual conference called Experience in Las Vegas at the Executive Women's Luncheon, and we just simply ran out of time. I want to do a special shout out to Carmen Sherman at Member First Mortgage who suggested we do a follow-up discussion as a podcast, and so here we are today. So Carey, for those who weren't with us in Vegas, can you give us the 60-second version of your story, please?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh, sure. So I grew up in Wisconsin, so I'm a Western gal in a family where aviation wasn't just a profession, but it was actually part of the language of our house. So my dad flew for the Marine Corps in Vietnam and later went on to have a long career with the airlines. My brother, I have one brother, became a military pilot. And so from an early age, flying wasn't just some abstract dream. It really felt like a calling, but that eventually led me to the United States Navy where I became one of the first female F-14 Tomcat pilots. And yes, on paper, I know that sounds like a story about speed and adrenaline and launching from an aircraft carrier.

You're landing on a moving deck in the middle of the night operating from one of the most demanding environments on earth, as you shared. But what I discovered really quickly is that flying fighters was never really just about airplanes, but it was about how humans perform under pressure about teamwork, trust, mutual support, and how teams build trust when lives depend on it and how we make decisions when that information can really be incomplete. And really it was understanding how do you stay focused when everything around you is constantly changing? And honestly, that question just really never left me.

So as you shared after the Navy, I've spent the next chapter of my life helping organizations and teams navigate complexity, uncertainty and continuous change. And now I'm in a doctoral program so that research and studying is really going in a direction of what I call leaders as chief sense makers because under pressure people don't just need answers. They need someone who is really able to help them understand what's happening, what matters now, and most importantly, what's possible next. So 60, 90 seconds, that's kind of been my journey in a nutshell.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Not all heroes wear capes, right? Some fly F-14 like you. So let's jump in. So you just kind of touched on this, but you speak a lot about needing to be prepared to prioritize what matters most. So how do you know when a plan is good enough to execute versus when you're over planning as a way to avoid action?

Carey Lohrenz:

Gosh, that's such an important question because if I'm honest, high performers can become incredibly sophisticated at hiding fear behind preparation. And the dangerous part is it doesn't look like fear. It can look like discipline and it looks like maybe another strategy session, another forecast or another scenario analysis, maybe an offsite. It can become just one more data point. And while all those things are very valuable, they are up until the point that planning quietly becomes what I would call a socially acceptable form of self-protection.

And when I think back to my past in Naval aviation, planning was sacred before every mission we studied weather, fuel, threats, airfields, communications, contingencies, all the things, every variable we could reasonably anticipate because when you're flying a $45 million fighter jet off the front end of an aircraft carrier, you don't wing it. But one of the things aviation teaches you is no amount of planning eliminates uncertainty.

At some point that yellow shirt on the deck is going to kneel down, point at your jet and says, "It's go time." And in that moment, there are no more revisions. There's no more analysis, there's no more what ifs. It's just execution. And I think leadership works exactly the same way. And over the years, I've learned that a plan is usually good enough, usually when three things are clear. First, your mission, obviously, not the activity, not the checklist, but the mission. Being able to answer, what are we actually trying to accomplish? The second thing is the major risks, not every possible risk, but just the few that could fundamentally change the outcome. And third, planning for your first moves.

So if conditions change tomorrow morning, does everyone know what happens next? Who decides? Who communicates? Who are we counting on to adapt? So if those three things are clear and we're still not moving, we may not be planning anymore. We actually might be negotiating with fear and trying to negotiate with uncertainty. And I say that with a lot of empathy because I've done it. I've watched plenty of executives do it. You've seen it. We've all watched elite performers do it. But what I've learned both operationally and now definitely through my research is that clarity is often the reward for action. It's not the prerequisite.

So if we think about everything that's happening today, the question I'd ask your leadership team tomorrow, whether you're the one in charge, you're a director, you're a middle manager, is what decisions are we delaying because we wish we knew more? And then I would ask, what would we do if waiting were no longer an option? Because that question and the answer tends to really expose where that fear is hiding. And once you're able to name it and identify the elephant in the room, then you can lead through that. So that's kind of where I would position that.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Waiting is almost a symptom of overplanning a little bit, right? Because you don't feel like you've got it all together. So what at the end of the day does that really cost an organization? Obviously not talking money, but from the top down of how people feel, how that impacts the overall plan and the execution.

Carey Lohrenz:

Well, I think that's a great question. And I think most leaders would probably say the cost is time. They would say, "Oh, it just costs us time." And of course it does, but your markets are moving, clearly, competitors move, technology moves, it changes capital moves, talent moves. But honestly, I think, and this could be a point of debate, I think that time is the cheapest thing over planning costs. I think what it really costs us is organizational confidence because teams always know when leadership is hesitating.

Long before the numbers show up, people feel it. They feel it in meetings, that lead to more meetings. They feel it when priorities are shifting every 15 days or every 30 days. They feel it when projects launch with energy and great inspiration and then they just quietly disappear. I think one of the things I've really noticed definitely in the last, I'm going to say it's the last seven years, not just the last 12 to 14 months, but people really feel it when leaders say they want innovation. Everybody wants innovation, innovation, innovation, but they punish mistakes. And what happens over time is really fascinating. And again, it aligns with what I'm studying right now in leadership communication and sense making.

And what I'm seeing essentially on the ground is that when leaders hesitate long enough, teams begin to reinterpret what's safe and unfortunately then they start playing it safe. So what does that look like? Middle managers stop making decisions. High performers, the people you've always counted on stop bringing you bold ideas. People get quieter. They stop challenging assumptions because they start waiting for permission and certainty because we start internalizing, you know what? We're going to move when more certainty arrives. When things become a little more stable, that's when we're going to move, but it never arrives. Not in markets, not in technology, certainly not in regulation, geopolitics, just you can name it.

So that paralysis, that waiting doesn't just delay your execution. It ends up having a next level order effect of it creates cultural dependency, uncertainty and that dependency that then all of a sudden teams that used to be agile start freezing innovation slows, trust erodes, and quite frankly, risk tolerance disappears. So we just have to continue to ask ourself one of the things because so much definitely in the corporate world and even in the entrepreneur space, people talk about 30, 60, 90 day plans. We always anchor on that 30, 60, 90 is just ask yourself or ask your teams, "Hey, what have we been talking about for more than 90 days without making a decision?" And then just be quiet.

Let people write that down. Don't interrupt, don't give your ideas, write those answers down. And then just think that through when you get those answers, when you get that kind of mind map, if you will, what's the cost of that? What's the cost financially? What's the cost operationally, culturally, of waiting another 90 days? When you frame it that way, I think that conversation alone can actually start to change your culture because what gets named you can finally take action on and it will finally move.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I love that. I'm going to adopt that in my day-to-day life. I think that's great because uncertainty spreads fast, and then you start eroding confidence across everybody when they're not sure of what the plan is and it's been sitting there for 90 days, 180 days, things get worse and worse and then it kind of branches out like a tree.

Carey Lohrenz:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It spreads like a wildfire.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Exactly. So I've heard you say that effective execution is killed by task switching and task saturation. So in a world where we have email, Teams messages, phones ringing, I mean, it feels near impossible to avoid these things. Do you have any advice on how to cut out the noise so you can execute what's in front of you and stay focused on what matters?

Carey Lohrenz:

Yes. So I'm going to bring it back into my world for just a hot second because answering that question and figuring out how to unlock what's possible when you're overwhelmed, when you're under a lot of pressure, when there are expectations that other people have a view or you have of yourself that you are trying to meet all of that kind of became the foundation for what I wrote about, as we talked about in Las Vegas in span of control. And I'll give you just a quick story because I'll never forget one particular night in somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where here I am trying to bring aboard a 72,000 pound F-14 on the aircraft carrier at night and there's no moon, there's no stars, no visible horizon. It's super heavy seas. The back end of the ship is moving 30 feet up and down. It's just an ugly scenario across the board for everybody.

And at the same time, I'm listening to three radios, my backseat or my Rio is talking, the ship is talking, your fuel state matters, the weather matters, timing matters. Everything feels urgent, overwhelming, and invisible at the same time. And so everything is screaming for your attention. So your focus is being pulled in a million different directions, but we train for understanding that in that moment we have to figure out how you take all of that complexity and urgency and reduce it down to the most important things. And we call that meatball lineup angle of attack and you don't have to be in food service or restaurateur to appreciate this, just kind of think about it. So it's what your glide slope is, it's how your lineup is and essentially what your speed coming aboard the ship is.

So we take all that complexity and we put it into something that's clear and repeatable, meatball lineup angle of attack, that's it. If I take care of those three things, I have a shot at being successful, not because the environment became less chaotic, but because I had learned to be disciplined about what deserved my attention because under pressure, leaders don't usually fail because they don't care. They fail because they're trying to care about too many things at once and none of our brains are designed to effectively process what are essentially unlimited competing priorities. And yet most leaders walk into the day trying to manage 50 open loops, 12 meetings, maybe four or 10 different strategic priorities. We've got crises that we're navigating and an inbox that's already dictating your attention before you've really even finished your first cup of coffee.

That's not leadership, that's reaction and reaction always feels urgent, but that it's really taking a hot second to understand that urgency and importance are not the same thing. So now when I work with leaders, when we're really getting into the finer details, I'll often just ask, "Hey, what are your three meatballs? What do we need to focus on today to make sure we stay relevant, respected, and moving forward?" So it's about taking that time to identify what are the three most important things because if you haven't probably identified what matters most, your team certainly can't and that's when the overwhelm starts to happen. And as all of our research shows, that task saturation is the number one killer to your effective execution and it can happen to anybody, even the most talented teams.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I'll have to ask, is there a reference to meatball for anything other than an actual meatball on spaghetti?

Carey Lohrenz:

Well, because we're fighter pilots and we try to clarify the complex all the time, it is simply just this little yellow orange ball that is on the side of the landing area that we use to judge our altitude. So if it's above the green line of green lights or green little balls, you're high if it starts to sink down to orange or red, you're low. So we just want the meatball, just a yellow light in between the green, but it's being able to interpret the visual information in a really dynamic three-dimensional space that is constantly changing. It's moving away from you, it's pitch black, all the things. So again, it's always about clarifying the complex and planning to become overwhelmed that we know we are going to become overwhelmed. So how do we plan to be successful in spite of that?

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I'm glad I asked. Thank you for that explanation. One of the themes that we really did not get to touch on a few weeks ago was something I've heard you say, which is not taking a risk is one of the biggest risks you can take. And that ties to a theme that I often say, which is if you don't ask a question, the answer is always no, meaning A, you've got to put yourself out there and B, take the risk of not getting it, or worst case, failing. So how have you encouraged yourself to look past the fear and empower yourself to just go for it?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh, great question. So I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have, whether it's about leaders or special operators, fighter pilots, astronauts, they've been top of the news story for the last couple of weeks. I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have is that experienced leaders or high performers somehow stop feeling it. And quite frankly, that's never been my experience. I've launched off aircraft carriers at night. I've landed on a moving deck 2000 miles from shore where there's no divert field, there's no margin for error and there is no backup runway. I've built businesses. I've written books that you worry about whether or not they're going to be successful. I've had to walk into boardrooms where nobody knew necessarily what to make of a former fighter pilot and what value they would bring.

I started my doctorate later in life. I can tell you that for nobody, that fear, the fear of failure, the fear of not being enough, the fear of will I be successful? It never fully disappears, but I flip it and I know some of the friends and very successful leaders I know, I think do the same thing, that you have to flip it and realize it's just a good signal. Fear is not a weakness and I hate when it gets portrayed as such, but you have to think of that fear as information and it usually shows up when something matters to you. So the problem's never the fear itself. The problem is when fear becomes your decision maker and certainly when I was younger and early in my career and when I lived under a very white-hot spotlight, there were times I felt like, and I internalized that courage meant overriding fear, but having courage actually means you're being a little more disciplined than that.

It's not about being perfect, it's about learning how to interpret fear and the signals it's giving you without obeying it, if that makes sense. I always say it's a good thing if the hair on the back of your neck is standing up because that means you're probably not going to become complacent. So in the cockpit, fear didn't mean stop. It meant, okay, take a second, slow your breathing, trust your training, check your instruments, execute the next procedure. Nothing more, nothing less. And I think that lesson even has changed somewhat the way I lead because certainly what I've discovered is that under uncertainty, people don't need leaders who pretend not to feel fear. They need leaders who can model composure inside of uncertainty. And I think that's really important and it's important to understand even the signals that we're looking for and watching leaders exhibit because that's where that trust begins.

And trust, by the way, is not built on leaders always having all of the answers. Trust is built because leaders become predictable under pressure because people trust what they can predict. Can they predict your reaction when bad news arrives? Can they predict whether you'll listen or whether you'll blame or throw them under the bus? They want to predict if you're going to stay grounded or if you'll become maybe even emotionally volatile because that's leadership. So if you're listening to this right now and you're trying to move through a space of fear or crushing paralyzing uncertainty, just you don't have to have it all figured out. And you and I have talked about this. It's what would courage look like in the next 60 seconds, not the entire next year, not forever, just the next 60 seconds.

Maybe it's making that phone call, maybe it's having a hard conversation, maybe it's admitting you were wrong or saying to your team, "You know what? I don't know yet, but here's what we do know." And I think that last piece is critical because trust is such an economic driver because people can handle uncertainty. What they struggle with is silence and a lack of transparency. So we just have to figure out, understand that that hair on the back of your neck standing up is there to, I think, keep you safe, keep you aware and it also gives you the permission to keep moving forward, but don't stay silent.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

It helps drive, right?

Carey Lohrenz:

Yes.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

It helps drive you. And I think that ties into one of the stories that you shared about when you took a risk in your career, when they gave you, you couldn't fly, woman were banned, they gave you two options and you said, "Nope, what about this third option?" And that took courage, that took risk to go in there and throw something out on the table that wasn't proposed already.

Carey Lohrenz:

Right. And that's not easy. Yeah, it isn't easy for anybody and it's learning how to be okay with what can be at times crushing discomfort, which I know I've joked with you before, people always love to talk about being gritty and, "Oh, we have to have a lot of grit. We're going to be really gritty," until you realize that being gritty feels for all of us what that rhymes with and then suddenly it's not so fun anymore, but it happens to everybody. You're not alone in feeling that. It is how do you keep moving forward in spite of that?

Lindsey Pfeifer:

So you mentioned this a little bit, but sometimes leaders aren't the experts in the room. So do you have any advice for those who are in charge of the vision and the plan, but they really need to rely on others for that subject matter expertise to have the execution across the board and realize that it's not all on them, right? It takes the team?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh gosh. Yeah. And that's leadership 101 because honestly, I think this is where a lot of leaders very unintentionally get it wrong because they think that having that vision, once you've said the vision, you put it out in the email, you have it on your marketing material, your collateral, your website, they think that's going to create the movement and it doesn't. Having that leadership title or authority, it's not the same as earning followership. So nobody does this alone. Definitely flying fighters, you rely on a lot of people from maintainers, ordinance crew, flight deck crews, intelligence teams, folks in food service. You rely on hundreds of people doing their job with absolute precision that maybe you're not even talking to every day.

And one of the fastest ways to not be successful in that environment is to think your title or your position insulates you or makes you self-sufficient. And I think the same thing can happen in organizations. I think that too often some leaders often think that their job is to get people to simply execute their vision. And I think that's really incomplete. I think a big part of leadership is helping people see themselves inside the vision and part of it and owning it. And that's very different. And it's hard when you can have some industries right now that feel transactional, but I've never seen people commit to a mission simply because of a PowerPoint or because of a marketing slogan. They commit to meaning, they commit to clarity, they commit to people that they can trust.

And I think that gets overall, you can net that down to three things pretty quickly and it all relies on a foundation of competence, character. I think character still matters in consistency. Do you do what you say? Can you do what you said you were going to do? The consistency part, I think people are really looking for folks and leaders whose values hold under pressure and even do your behavior stay consistent when things get hard? Things are hard right now, right? They are. There's so much change and so much uncertainty. But when you can align those three things, the competence, character and consistency, trust grows and the fastest way to break that trust within your team I think is being inconsistent, not doing what you said you were going to do. Maybe it's saying one thing and rewarding another thing.

Like we've talked about, we see folks quite often talking about transparency and then they withhold information or they talk about innovation. This is the thing that always kind of sticks in my crawl a little bit. It's the relentless focus on innovation while you're punishing mistakes along that pathway or talking about accountability, but you exempt your top performers from being accountable. People notice all of that. So if you're the person carrying the vision right now, I think just having a conversation with your team, your immediate team, you can even ask the questions at scale is simply ask without having a knee-jerk response right away or think you need to explain, just ask the questions, "Do you understand where we're going? Do you understand why it matters and do you understand your role in getting us there?" Because ... Go ahead.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

No, I'd say part of that really is creating a safe space for people to actually speak up and feel comfortable in that [inaudible 00:29:49].

Carey Lohrenz:

Absolutely. And I think if there's a hesitation in any of those, what we too often identify as an execution problem is actually a communication problem and communication in times of uncertainty is leadership and exactly what you just said. When people feel safe enough to speak up, to push back, that's actually where the magic happens and that's not being woo-woo. That's understanding the reality of team dynamics and how are you going to drive results over the long term?

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. I like to say there's no such thing as stupid questions. What is stupid is assuming that you know the answer when you don't and then sharing the wrong answer and then having to walk it back. And hence why I asked the meatball question. I was like, if I don't know it, probably somebody else out there is thinking the same thing. So I think part of being a leader is creating that space where people can ask those questions when they aren't really sure what the answer is and feeling comfortable to speak up and challenge it or talk through those things. But creating the environment where everyone is encouraged to contribute and to know where we're headed.

Carey Lohrenz:

Right. And you know what? I think you've hit the nail on the head because I think that's actually ... It's one of the most important questions and challenges right now of our time with the relentless pace of change. Because certainly what I've found is under uncertainty, organizations don't usually fail because people don't see problems. They fail because people don't feel safe enough to say what they see. Or nobody's ever asked them. I saw this in aviation. If a junior maintainer saw something wrong on my aircraft and stayed silent, that wasn't a communication issue. That was a culture issue. Somehow they didn't feel safe enough to tell me there was a problem.

In business, it's no different. The question people are always asking right now, whether consciously I think or even unconsciously is what happens here when someone tells the truth? And all of us are scanning the environment nonstop for that right now. What happens when somebody is brave enough to tell the truth? Do people get listened to or do they get interrupted? Do they get thanked or do they get humiliated or embarrassed? Do leaders become more curious and say, "That's interesting. Tell me more." Or, "I wasn't aware of that. Tell me more." Or do they immediately get defensive? Because it's in these micro moments that determine psychological safety.

And again, this is not the woo-woo. I don't want to offend anybody, but we're not talking about crystal rocks and feel good things. This is not about simply making people comfortable. It is about making it safe to contribute. It's making it safe to challenge assumptions, to admit mistakes, to say, "I think we missed something." Or simply, like you just said, I don't understand. Or can you go back because I'm not sure what you just said? Or simply, I disagree or I need help, or we don't have the resources. And again, this goes back to trust is the foundation underneath all of that.

And where do we fracture that trust immediately? Where do we silence people immediately? We blame without asking questions or without learning. Public humiliation, leader unpredictability, avoiding accountability and silence. It's that silence that is so incredibly expensive. So I think all of us, if you are in a leadership position, maybe you're on a board, maybe you're an aspiring leader. The next time somebody brings you bad news, maybe it's within your family. Pause. Just pause. Don't just zip it. Take a hot second, take a breath and instead of saying, you made a mistake or who owns this? Just ask, "Okay, tell me more or what are we learning?" Because accountability should never be a four-letter word and it also doesn't mean instant punishment.

It means we can acknowledge the reality harsh as it may be sometimes and we learn fast and we adapt together and that's how trust gets built because once it breaks, trust is not rebuilt through speeches or through command and comply. It's built through consistent behavior over time. And people as a whole are incredibly forgiving, I think. When leaders genuinely hold themselves accountable first and can say, "Hey, you know what? I made this mistake and I can fix it." Yeah, that's a great place to start.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

And trust can be broken in a second and take forever to rebuild.

Carey Lohrenz:

100%.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I know you published some research results last year and one of them is that you found 63% of people would leave their job for better leadership, not more money, just a better leader. What is one thing that leaders could start doing tomorrow that would actually move the needle for them? That transparency, is that execution? Is that listening more? All of the above maybe?

Carey Lohrenz:

Yeah. So the list is long and distinguished, but actually I think the first thing, if I had to pick one thing, it would be debrief really without a question. I think too often when even I talk to organizations or I first start working with teams and we start implementing debriefing, initially there's some tension and there's some hesitancy because people feel like it's just another thing that they have to do now that somehow they have to carve out time for. Or they say, "You know what? We do that already. We do 180-day after action reports. We do it when there's a crisis." But when I talk about debriefing, we're not talking about just quarterly, not just after a crisis, not when it's convenient. It's developing the habit of doing it every day, even if it's just for five minutes. Because again, I think one of the biggest myths in leadership is that experience creates wisdom, right?

You just have a magic wand and now suddenly because you have 12 years, 22 years, whatever, 18 years of tenure that you're wise, it doesn't. It's taking the time to reflect on experience that eventually creates wisdom. And right now, how fast everybody is running, we're skipping over this really, really valuable part. We debriefed after every single flight, not because we had extra time, not because it felt good and definitely not because our egos enjoyed it. We debriefed because lives dependent on learning faster than the environment was changing. And if you think about world leaders today, big leaders in financial markets, AI is changing workflows overnight, literally overnight. There is plenty of geopolitical instability.

You've got supply chain shocks, you've got relentless cyber threats, you've got shifting markets. There's a lot of talent disruption. I'd argue we're in our own version right now of operating in blue water operations without a landing zone in sight. So there's no backup runway. How are we going to figure this out? And what worries me the most right now is that organizations are moving so fast, but they're learning slower because they're becoming so reactionary. And I think that's dangerous because under uncertainty, the organizations that win won't necessarily be the biggest or the smartest, or dare I say, even the best funded. They are going to be the ones that can learn and adapt and realign faster than the environment changes around them. And that's what debriefing does, right?

Because we want to be able to figure out very quickly and in a disciplined fashion what worked, what didn't, and what are we going to do different next time? And if you're waiting 90 days to do that or 180 days to do that, or you are introducing blame or politics or you get instantly defensive, that's not learning. And again, if you take the time to debrief and you ask people what are they seeing, what worked, what didn't, what can we do different, why, and what can we do differently next time? People become more honest. Signals I think surface faster up the leadership chain. And what happens? Mistakes get smaller. So we find ourselves not having to celebrate firefighting as much because we're catching what seem to be really big movements. We're catching them earlier on.

So trust grows, accountability improves and culturally, I think as importantly, people stop hiding reality and in uncertain times across every industry, having a brutal acknowledgement of reality and understanding what's possible. And I think trying to figure out how many people can you bring with you, I think that's your greatest competitive advantage.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. I think people are a little bit more vulnerable if you do that briefing in more real time versus sitting on it, then people are internalizing it, trying to figure out what they should have done or what someone else should have done rather than just speaking about just what happened and taking the real raw feedback at that moment versus if you do it 30, 90 days later, whatever it may be, they've had more time to think through it that it's not as an immediate reaction about what had just happened and how do you fix it go forward.

Carey Lohrenz:

Right. And for all of us, the further away we move from things and too often whether you're working in the finance industry, manufacturing industry, maybe 40 years ago, 180-day after action report was okay, maybe. I'm not saying it was, but I'll just allow for maybe because the communication channels didn't happen so fast. The pace of change just simply was not every day, every hour, every four hours. It wasn't what it is right now. There was more time in the system, but the reality is different right now. So we just have to acknowledge that and figure out how do we operate a little bit differently so that we stay relevant so that we can keep contributing and providing value to the marketplace.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. So let's invert the question. So what do you wish more leaders would just stop doing?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh gosh, I could probably write another book on this and it would actually be a short one. I wish more leaders would stop pretending that certainty is leadership. I see it all the time. Leaders think their job is to walk in the room with all the answers with a lot of bravado and way too much confidence. They think it's to 100% to project confidence nonstop, to eliminate all that ambiguity and to make everyone feel like they've got everything under control. Hey, I understand why. Nobody wants to sit on an end of quarter call or at a conference with 14,000 people and have a leader walk in schlumpy with their hands in their pockets all mopey going, "Oh, everything's really bad. I don't know what we're going to do." You can't do that as a CEO, as a founder, a board member, as a military leader.

Clearly people are watching you and they're wanting you to inspire confidence, but people don't need perfect leaders whose confidence outweighs their kick. They need trustworthy leaders and we confuse that we think we need perfect leaders, but what we need are trustworthy leaders and that's not always the same thing. I think some of the fastest ways, again, that we've talked about when you talk about destroying trust, they're surprisingly common. It's overpromising. It is under communicating. It's thinking, "Well, I sent out the email, people should have read it" or "We've said this five times. People should know this." No, they don't. Or you watch leaders change, they change directions all the time without context.

Or one of the hardest things is when they talk about accountability and then avoid hard conversations. So people notice all of this. So I just wish that people would ... Leaders would stop confusing performance of certainty with the practice of leadership because it's not about having all the answers. It's about having the competence and the humility to say, "Here's what we know now, here's what we don't know yet, and maybe here's what matters now. Here is how I think we can move forward together." Again, this is about building trust. It is about creating psychological safety, which you need to be innovative, which you need to be transformative.

So it's how do you replace, if you will, I'm going to call it performative certainty with just one moment of honest clarity. It's okay to say the markets are changing so fast. We don't know whatever. We don't know X, but we're going to figure it out together. Okay. I can work with that. People can work with that. As soon as your team or your investors or your shareholders start sniffing out some polished BS, they will start pulling back. You may not see it right away, but you've already broken some trust with them. And like we talked about, it takes a long time to rebuild that. So it's okay to say, "I don't know the answer to that. Let me find out and I'll get back to you."

Lindsey Pfeifer:

100% agree. Yeah. I'm responsible for all the client relationships here at ICE Mortgage Technology and I'm huge on transparency, especially with clients. I always tell my team that bad news ages like trash, right? Longer it exists the worst it smells, the longer it goes the more cleanup work you have to do and it's not fun. So I believe you use the acronym Bluff Bottom Line upfront. Can you share a little bit more about that concept?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh, absolutely. That's one of my favorites. So it actually stems from military communication. When I first learned it, I really didn't realize how profoundly it would shape not just communication, but the way I even think about leadership oftentimes, because certainly in aviation when you're flying at Mach 1, Mach 2, nobody has time for a 10-minute backstory. Don't build me the carburetor. Not when you're on final approach, not when systems are failing, not when you're on fire, not when multiple people are talking to you on all different frequencies, not when millions of dollars of lives are on the line. So you always lead with the most important thing first, always.

So bluff just means simply tell me what matters first. Then give me the context, then give me options, then give me recommendations. It sounds simple, but it's incredibly powerful. Think about the relentless email chains we get that are paragraph upon paragraph and upon paragraph where the most important thing is actually in the fourth paragraph, fourth sentence in, not even bolded or highlighted. So it gets skipped over. Right? And that operating from a bottom line upfront place reduces cognitive overload. And right now, uncertainty creates a ton of cognitive overload. And as we know, when people are overwhelmed, your brains don't process complexity better. They process clarity better. So it's especially relevant today.

So again, we're not just dealing with market volatility or geopolitical issues. We are dealing with a ton, a metric ton of information overload. It is relentless. Slack, email, text, AI dashboards, news alerts, global headlines, all of it. Everyone is cognitively saturated. So don't bury the lead. Don't avoid the hard truth and please, for all that is holy, don't communicate in corporate jargon. Trust drops, decision quality drops, execution slows and frustration rises because people are trying to psychoanalyze all your word garbage. So just respect people's attention and their cognitive bandwidth. And if your team only remembers one sentence from your email, what needs to be first?

If they have to remember one thing from your town hall or your board update, what needs to be first? Start there. And uncertain times, clarity is kindness. Stop with the gobbledygook. Clear is kind. Do that.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. Those five paragraph emails that I get, I throw them into AI and give me a summary and get down to the point, right?

Carey Lohrenz:

So hard. So hard.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

When we were in Vegas, you shared that those on your team supporting you were new almost every nine months and quite inexperienced. How did you build trust to ensure that you were comfortable with your teammates as changed happened so fast in such a fast-paced environment?

Carey Lohrenz:

Gosh, so that's a great question. And I think too often and maybe because of what we read in books or what we see in movies that you think there's just this relentless positive environment where people all love each other in squadrons or are all so supportive of each other all the time and it's all great. And yes, there are egos involved, but trust in aviation certainly was never built just because we liked each other. And I think that's important to acknowledge because you didn't necessarily get to pick who you flew with or who your wingmen were or who your squadron mates were, but you were in it together and we don't have the opportunity to build trust over team building exercises or personality assessments or trust falls.

No shade to anybody trying to implement those, but trust was built because failure had consequences. If a maintainer missed something or if somebody rushed a checklist, if I became emotionally too reactive in the cockpit, bad things could happen. So trust had to be operational. And again, this goes back to that competence, character, and I think consistency. So we think about, can you do your job? Does your character hold under pressure and are you consistent? Because we want to be able to build that trust within our team actually while we are still protecting people's egos.

So a lot of this simply can come down to following up and following through. So if you make a promise, follow through on it. And if you can't, tell people why immediately because again, within teams, that trust is rarely built on grand gestures or slogans. That trust compounds in really small moments.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

And I think that you hit on a good piece of that of excuses versus an explanation. Let me reword that.

Carey Lohrenz:

Yes.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Pause on the podcast piece. I think you hit on a good piece there of the difference between an excuse and an explanation and the difference that that makes because an excuse may make you feel better by decreasing your guilt, but by explaining and not always to others, sometimes to yourself too, you admit that you didn't succeed and then you look at the why around it to try to figure out what should you do next. Next time I'm in this same scenario, what would I do differently? And I think that's really key of the difference between those two and how that impacts others as well.

Carey Lohrenz:

Right. And this is where that debriefing comes back into play as well because what we oftentimes find in a debrief when you build and when you're working to build a culture of excellence and a culture of accountability within your team or your organization, what you discover very, very quickly, what you as a C-suite team, as a board, as a leadership team may think is exceptionally clear as to what you think the strategy and expectations are and that that's going to get populated down and executed upon, you will find out very, very quickly whether or not the people who are executing actually think success looks like what you think it looks like or what you have told them you think it looks like. We interpret things differently. Our perceptions and perspectives are all very different. The only way you'll ever discover that is through debriefing. And it's even such a grand opportunity when you do have talent turnover, when you are bringing new people on the team or new technology, it is a very vulnerable time right now for many organizations.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I got one last question for you to close this out. I have to ask with your background, what was your call sign?

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh gosh, not politically correct. Most are not because if we all got to choose our own call signs, which we don't, there would be 500 Thors or Magics or Mavericks or who knows what, but mine was Vixen. I always kind of joke tongue in cheek. It's just one X, not two, so it gets through most spam filters. And it was just because usually I was the only one when we went on detachment. I was one of the only women around. So too often locally people would not realize you were one of the pilots. They would think you're somebody's significant other or partner. Some of the call signs that folks get are extraordinarily funny. Most of them, I'd say at least over 50%, not politically correct.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I love that.

Carey Lohrenz:

It is what it is.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. Do your teammates choose your call sign for you or?

Carey Lohrenz:

Yeah, it's either something really notable you did not so notable or it simply rhymes with your last name. Sometimes people's last names spelled backwards tend to be really funny, or maybe it's a guy knew in one of my squadrons ended up blowing both tires because he ground his breaks down. So his call sign switched to grinder, which back then was pretty funny. Now it might have a different implication, but I don't think that's what he meant.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:55:45].

Carey Lohrenz:

Yeah, different times. But yeah, and again, the genesis of them always were or always had been for safety reasons because you don't want somebody else to know who you are talking on the radio.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

I love that. It sounds like they're all like many personal jokes, huh?

Carey Lohrenz:

Yeah. We all definitely, I think in our vocation we take our jobs extraordinarily seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. And we try to have a little fun along the way because if you're not having some fun when you're working really hard in a really challenging environment, you're not doing it right. So you have to have a little bit of fun along the way. That's right.

Lindsey Pfeifer:

Well, Carey, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Carey Lohrenz:

Oh my gosh, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I hope we get to chat again.

Speaker 3:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week inside The Ice House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation have been offered to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.