Cujo Teschner [00:00:00]:
Accountability is used on the heels of a failure to try to correct the failure, usually with a degree of punishment, usually with a degree of fear of punishment that sparks us to change behaviors. Most folks are familiar with accountability as a punishment, punishment for something that didn't go well. Outcome of accountability is, “oh no, let's not do it again this way.” And it doesn't really stimulate top performers to be better. In order to be effective, we've got to learn constantly. Hey. Our ambition post mission is to learn. It's forward looking and with a positive, forward-focused approach.
Cujo Teschner [00:00:37]:
We're going to be 100% vulnerable. We're going to admit to everything that we did so that we can learn from it. Because our ambition is, as a team, to be better tomorrow than we were today. And it's in mentoring and coaching and teaching our team through the failure that we've become the kind of team that we want to be.
00:52 - Meet Cujo: Fighter Pilot Turned Business Coach
Jack Jostes [00:00:52]:
All right, everyone. Welcome back to The Landscaper's Guide. Right now, I'm in Savannah, Georgia, at the Bach Business Partners Summit, and I'm here with Cujo Teschner, the author of Debrief to Win. He just gave an incredible keynote on accountability. And I said, hey, could we have a conversation on the podcast? So, Cujo, thanks for coming on The Landscaper's Guide.
Cujo Teschner [00:01:12]:
Thanks so much for having me. What a true pleasure here today in Savannah.
Jack Jostes [00:01:16]:
It is, it is. And where do you live?
Cujo Teschner [00:01:18]:
St. Louis, Missouri. It's environs. I'm out west of St. Louis. That's my adopted home.
Jack Jostes [00:01:23]:
Okay, that's cool. And so tell us a little bit about your background. Who are you and what is Debrief to Win?
Cujo Teschner [00:01:28]:
Yep. I am a recovering violin and piano player who found my way into the world of fighter aviation. Got a chance to fly high performance fighter aircraft for about 20 years of my Air Force career. Colorectal cancer took me out of the cockpit, took me into the entrepreneurial space. And I've made it my life's work to teach how it is that we team effectively in the world of high-performance teams, to be business teams like the ones that are here at Bach Business Partners, to help all teams to win in disruption and to win big in business.
02:02 - From Suzuki Violin to Air Force Cockpit
Jack Jostes [00:02:02]:
Tell me more about your violin playing.
Cujo Teschner [00:02:05]:
Yeah. Two years old, I heard somebody play the violin. I said, mom, I want to go do that. So she signed me up for Suzuki violin training, which is basically an audio learn from the record how to play the thing. Did that and fell in love with it, and played violin for most of my formative years.
Jack Jostes [00:02:24]:
Did you learn to read music?
Cujo Teschner [00:02:25]:
Never.
Jack Jostes [00:02:26]:
I also grew up playing violin with the Suzuki method.
Cujo Teschner [00:02:30]:
Outstanding.
Jack Jostes [00:02:31]:
I stopped around the time that I would have progressed to learning to read music and then somebody handed me a mandolin, and I've played mandolin for the last 22 years.
Cujo Teschner [00:02:49]:
Good.
Jack Jostes [00:02:49]:
Goodness. And that's actually how I learned business was. Cause I played mandolin in a rock band and promoted our band through social media, built our email list. I did sales by booking paid gigs and negotiating. So that was actually a pretty formative experience for me. Why did you share it here?
Cujo Teschner [00:03:09]:
It's just something that people don't expect. They kind of have an idea of what a fighter pilot probably looks like come up with and that kind of spoils it. But you mentioned mandolin. One of my grandparent's favorite movies of all time was Dr. Zhivago, which features Lara's theme and a beautiful mandolin piece that runs throughout, which is pretty cool.
Jack Jostes [00:03:33]:
That's amazing. Well, so you went from playing violin to then,
03:36 - Why Cujo Joined the Air Force
Jack Jostes [00:03:36]:
How did you join the Air Force?
Cujo Teschner [00:03:39]:
Dad was in the Air Force. He was an attorney in the Air Force, so he was a JAG officer. I loved being in the Air Force as an Air Force kid. When he retired, I felt like he was letting us all down. I'm like, how can you give up our family? The Air Force is our family. So I knew the day that he retired that I was going to join as soon as I could. And then I followed through on my threat and, as a 17-year-old, went off to the Air Force Academy and began my Air Force journey.
04:06 - Debrief to Win: Military Roots of a Business Breakthrough
Jack Jostes [00:04:06]:
Tell me, what is Debrief to Win? And how is it used in the military at this time?
Cujo Teschner [00:04:12]:
Yep. One of the things that I learned early on in my Air Force journey was that in order to be effective, we've gotta learn constantly. And the way that we learn in a high-performance team is by way of something that we call the debrief, which happens after every mission. It's our opportunity to kind of dissect that mission, understand why the mission went the way that it did, and then ideally learn by applying what we've dissected in this mission to make the next one go better. And it is such an effective means of team learning that I knew when I was responsible for teaching this to the Air Force, and I was responsible for a while I was the accountability guy at the Air Force fighter weapons school. I knew that someday I was going to teach this in business because I understood this as a potential deficiency, something that wasn't universally practiced. And if it could be, it would be a huge boost to performance.
Jack Jostes [00:05:05]:
Well, and so maybe you already said this today. Where did you learn this? Or how was this created?
Cujo Teschner [00:05:12]:
So this. The origin story to this approach is World War I. And in World War I, at a time when the average life expectancy of a fighter pilot was three weeks and where pilots were incentivized to be outstanding individual performers, like go out there, shoot down five enemy aircraft, you're going to become an ace. Ace status is going to give you all kinds of accolades. The Germans were the first to say, we need to field a team that can learn after the mission. And the Germans were the first to Debrief to Win. We ended up doing the same thing as the Allied Expeditionary Forces starting in about 1917, 1918. And we found it in the fighter domain to be so effective that we've never stopped doing it.
Cujo Teschner [00:05:50]:
We've just gotten better as to how. So the Air Force, in all of its precursors, have been doing this since World War I. Fast forward. When I show up in a fighter squadron, this is how I learn how to fly high-performance fighter aircraft. It's with the post-mission debrief where my performance is analyzed and I'm taught what needs to be done better to arrive at the level of proficiency necessary to graduate. So I've been doing this ever since I started flying airplanes and then started getting really involved in what makes it work? How come it's so effective? And then wrote a book to describe that so that anybody could learn how to do it.
06:25 - Why Fear-Based Accountability Fails
Jack Jostes [00:06:25]:
One of the things you said was that accountability typically has a negative connotation.
Cujo Teschner [00:06:31]:
That's right.
Jack Jostes [00:06:32]:
And that the way you see it and the way you're coaching the audience to do it is to have more of a future forward and positive approach. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Cujo Teschner [00:06:45]:
That's right. You think about, like, you know, has anybody been trained to practice accountability? Usually, the answer is no. I've not been formally trained to practice accountability. Okay. Do you see accountability as necessary to sparking good performance? Yes, I see it as actually mission-critical to having a team that wins. So, what equips you to be able to practice it? I don't know. I just do what has been done to me. And what most people will report is that accountability is used on the heels of a failure to try to correct the failure, usually with a degree of punishment, usually with a degree of fear of punishment that sparks us to change behaviors.
Cujo Teschner [00:07:23]:
And if you study fear, it can be a source of transformation. It's just not an effective leadership mechanism. If it's used as the only way to help people to learn. So I'd say most folks are familiar with accountability as a punishment. Punishment for something that didn't go well. Outcome of accountability is, “oh no, let's not do it again this way.” And it doesn't really stimulate top performers to be better.
Cujo Teschner [00:07:49]:
The version that I was introduced to was one that said, hey, our ambition post mission is to learn. It's forward-looking and with a positive, forward-focused approach. We're going to be 100% vulnerable. We're going to admit to everything that we did so that we can learn from it. Because our ambition is as a team to be better tomorrow than we were today. And so it unleashes the full potential of a team. And that's what we rely on to navigate a very dangerous world. I mean, fighter aviation is dangerous in training or in combat. I've lost most of my friends due to training accidents, not combat losses.
Cujo Teschner [00:08:24]:
And we're going up against an enemy who's really, really dangerous and is trying to kill us. So we've got to be very effective learners and we've got to learn very quickly against a threat that gets worse by the day.
08:36 - Embracing Failure as a Strategy for Growth
Jack Jostes [00:08:36]:
How do you have these debriefs while addressing the issue, and maybe somebody on the team didn't pull their weight or do something, maybe there was a mistake. How do you embrace that in a way that is productive and addresses the issue, and is also still a learning and forward-positive experience?
Cujo Teschner [00:08:58]:
Yeah. Okay. So, another feature of a high-performance military team is that we embrace the heck out of failure. We see it as our best means of learning. We go into the simulator and we fail, fail, fail so that we can perform well as expected when the nation needs us to. And we don't fear it. We don't fear it at all. And when we fail, our leaders have been trained not to lead through a failure, but rather to become mentors and coaches, and teachers.
Cujo Teschner [00:09:27]:
And it's in mentoring and coaching and teaching our team through the failure that we become the kind of team that we want to be. And I think a team isn't one until they figure out how to navigate failure well. A good team can handle a failure pretty well. An outstanding team fails exceptionally well together. And high-performance teams are outstanding teams. And the key differentiator is that we understand the value of failure. In fact, if you want to go study up on failure, if you're kind of interested in this line of understanding, go read the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson and specifically look up her Harvard Business Review article.
Cujo Teschner [00:10:04]:
I think it's called Strategies for Learning from Failure. But regardless, in it, Dr. Edmondson, Harvard Business Review maps out a spectrum of failure. Some on the spectrum are blameworthy, some are praiseworthy. And what we find when we evaluate failure, most forms of failure are good for us. Think about it like when you were. When you hopped out of the womb, chances are you didn't dance a jig right away. Like, you know, you were just lying there and then eventually learned how to crawl.
Jack Jostes [00:10:32]:
We'll have to check the VHS.
Cujo Teschner [00:10:33]:
Yeah, we have to go check the days. But if you're like me, like when you actually started to get up on two legs, you fell a bunch, right?
Jack Jostes [00:10:40]:
Yeah.
Cujo Teschner [00:10:41]:
And parents thought it was cute. And that's why they got you on video. They got me on video for that. And we didn't fear it. Like, we just picked ourselves back up again and tried again. And eventually, by failing, failing, failing, failing, we figured it out and we stopped falling. Right? For some reason, we've poisoned the well and said in business we can't ever fail and failure is bad.
Cujo Teschner [00:10:59]:
It's interesting. High performance military teams, they embrace failure. And by learning through failure, we equip ourselves with the confidence that we're never going to fail this way again.
11:10 - Remembering Kevin Kehoe and Aspire’s Impact
Jack Jostes [00:11:10]:
Before we pressed record, you mentioned Kevin Kehoe, who was the founder of Aspire, who I had on this podcast, I think, five or six years ago. How did you know him? And tell us a little bit about your relationship.
Cujo Teschner [00:11:25]:
Yep. I was introduced to him, I believe, through another mutual friend, Mark Tipton. Kevin, at the time, was kind of the senior emeritus guy at Aspire, and he was very skeptical of me coming in and potentially delivering at one of the conferences that he was running. And so we went through a little interview process. And the next thing you know is I'm delivering a few keynotes to a couple of different conferences that Kevin put together. And then eventually, as Kevin was in the process of writing his book, he asked me to write the foreword to his book, One Hit Wonder. And that was a very wonderful thing. We became friends.
Cujo Teschner [00:12:04]:
In fact, we worked together to get Kevin into the world of Military Aviation. And if I'm not mistaken, he finished up as the Honorary Squadron Commander for one of the F16 Squadrons at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona.
Jack Jostes [00:12:16]:
Wait, Kevin did?
Cujo Teschner [00:12:17]:
Yes.
Jack Jostes [00:12:18]:
Really?
Cujo Teschner [00:12:18]:
And an honorary Squadron commander is a business leader in the local community that has essentially been adopted by a fighter squadron and becomes part of that organization for a period of time. It's part of our civil military collaboration, cooperation efforts.
Jack Jostes [00:12:33]:
Wow. I Didn't realize that.
Cujo Teschner [00:12:35]:
Yep.
Jack Jostes [00:12:35]:
I really enjoyed interviewing him.
Cujo Teschner [00:12:36]:
And such a good man.
Jack Jostes [00:12:38]:
He was in the process of publishing or working on the book at the time, so I'm going to have to check it out because it was like a collection of stories.
Cujo Teschner [00:12:45]:
That's right.
Jack Jostes [00:12:46]:
From his life.
Cujo Teschner [00:12:47]:
That's right. And he has such an amazing life and so many incredible stories. So it's all in there. It's all in one hit wonder. And it's such a huge loss that, unfortunately, cancer took him. Took him away.
Jack Jostes [00:13:01]:
Right. That's a shame.
13:04 - How Trust and Accountability Fix Dysfunctional Teams
Jack Jostes [00:13:04]:
One of the books that I've read, and the people that I follow that I saw a little bit of similarity or overlap with was Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Cujo Teschner [00:13:16]:
That's right.
Jack Jostes [00:13:17]:
And one of them was avoiding conflict.
Cujo Teschner [00:13:19]:
That's right.
Jack Jostes [00:13:19]:
And it seemed like that overlapped a little bit with this. With embracing accountability is part of one of the five dysfunctions of a team is avoiding conflict. So are you familiar with that book?
Cujo Teschner [00:13:33]:
100%.
Jack Jostes [00:13:34]:
How is your message similar, and maybe what's different, or what's a way that they're complementary?
Cujo Teschner [00:13:39]:
Yeah, they're hugely complementary because we have to realize what the deficiencies are. We have to make sure that we don't give in to those deficiencies. And then we've got to equip ourselves as a team to start with, building high degrees of trust, which happens when you learn how to navigate failure, and when people are fully vulnerable all the time about the truth of what it was that went down. And one of the things that's required in order to be able to Debrief to Win is for everybody on the team to be able to admit their mistakes and weaknesses publicly. If they can't do that, we can't trust that we're going to learn the right lesson. And if I can't trust you as a member of my team, I cannot go into combat with you. So, in the absence of trust and in the absence of being truthful, always, we really cannot be the fighting unit that we aim to be. And so we've had to eradicate those dysfunctions.
Cujo Teschner [00:14:26]:
We've had to embrace this notion that trust comes through the full admission of everything that really went on. We got to put the spotlight on the truth and then learn from that, and that's the way that we do it. And I'll tell you, when you hear this concept of a debrief, most people have no clue what it looks like.
Jack Jostes [00:14:46]:
Right.
14:46 - Why Top Gun Got Debriefing All Wrong
Cujo Teschner [00:14:46]:
And the only example that we really get from Hollywood in the original Top Gun Movie where Maverick is being debriefed by Charlie about his performance on a particular. It's 180 out from what these things actually look like in that example. And maybe people here have seen the original Top Gun movie. I would imagine some have.
Jack Jostes [00:15:08]:
I think most have. It’s probably been a while for some.
Cujo Teschner [00:15:09]:
May have been a minute.
Jack Jostes [00:15:12]:
Tell us about it.
Cujo Teschner [00:15:13]:
I mean, Charlie goes on the attack and immediately puts Maverick on the defensive. It's almost impossible for him to be vulnerable when he's put on the attack. And he's immediately defensive. And so what does he do? He responds defensively. And then it becomes an us versus them. And there's no trust in that kind of environment. And all that it is is conflict. We've not only not avoided conflict, we've created conflict at a point when we should be learning.
Cujo Teschner [00:15:38]:
And the outcome is, I'm against you, you're against me. I'm not going to listen to you at all. And I'm going to continue to do what it is that I did today, which in the movie doesn't set them up to win and is the opposite of creating a learning environment.
16:14 - The First Step to Accountable Leadership: Vulnerability
Jack Jostes [00:15:53]:
One of the things you said was that it starts with leadership, right? So for the leaders listening, for the owners of landscape companies or small businesses listening, how do you go first with this? What are some of the ways that. Right. Because somebody needs to go first. How do you do it? How do you get started?
Cujo Teschner [00:16:14]:
My leadership company does not work with every company that asks us to work with them. And one of the things that we're looking for is, can you as the CEO of your company, manifest vulnerability? And if you can't, if you're always perfect, then we literally cannot work together. And it's the modeling behavior of the leader. As Dr. Timothy Clark says in his work, outstanding work, Dr. Tim Clark, gotta look him up. He's all about psychological safety. Our modeling behavior as leaders is mission-critical to helping our teammates to evolve into what they can be.
Cujo Teschner [00:16:49]:
So if we think that vulnerability is important, then we as leaders, you and I, have to manifest it. If we can't manifest it, neither can our teammates. And if we can't manifest vulnerability, we can't take absolute ownership of the outcomes that we as a team have achieved. And we define accountability in here as taking absolute ownership for the outcomes that a team achieves. And accountability is one of the things that goes up the chain of command and resides at the top. So if we can't be accountable, can't expect our teammates to be accountable, we're accountable for everything that happens on our watch. That's a tough standard.
Jack Jostes [00:17:23]:
It is.
Cujo Teschner [00:17:23]:
And if we can't embrace that, we can't be the leaders that our teammates need us to be.
17:30 - Music, Mandolins, and Military Mindsets
Jack Jostes [00:17:30]:
Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. There's a lot to unpack here. There's a lot to read. Do you still play violin?
Cujo Teschner [00:17:40]:
I play mostly piano these days. As soon as I get my garage band together, it's back to the bass guitar as well.
Jack Jostes [00:17:46]:
Oh, great. There's always work for a bass guitarist.
Cujo Teschner [00:17:48]:
That's right. That's right. I love the percussion section. I love jamming. It's probably the easiest thing. I play a very basic bass guitar. This is the easiest way to knock out stress. I love it.
Cujo Teschner [00:18:02]:
Bring your mandolin next time that we get the garage band together.
Jack Jostes [00:18:06]:
Okay, I will. I will. And I record remotely with people.
Cujo Teschner [00:18:08]:
Ooh. Okay. Very nice.
Jack Jostes [00:18:09]:
If you're working on something and you need a mandolin track.
Cujo Teschner [00:18:12]:
Fantastic!
Jack Jostes [00:18:13]:
For real, I can put one down for you.
Cujo Teschner [00:18:15]:
I love that.
18:16 - Cujo’s Challenge + How You Can Apply This Now
Jack Jostes [00:18:16]:
All right, well, Cujo Teschner, author of Debrief to Win, How America's Top Guns practice accountable leadership and how you can too. You guys, check out this book. And Cujo, thanks so much for coming on The Landscaper’s Guide.
Cujo Teschner [00:18:28]:
Thank you so much for having me today. Good meeting you here. Glad to be here. Glad to be in this industry. Keep on rocking it. We appreciate the great work that you're doing out there.
Jack Jostes [00:18:38]:
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Cujo, and if you did, make sure you check out his book, Debrief to Win. I'm excited to read it. Learned a lot. I'm excited to debrief on this trip that I did. We're going to debrief and try some of Cujo's ideas as a team. Right now, we're at the Bach Business Partners Leadership Event. It was phenomenal. Make sure you check out Bach Business Partners and see what other events The Landscaper’s Guide team has coming up at landscapersguide.com/events.
Jack Jostes [00:19:07]:
We have a variety of in-person and virtual events to help you grow your snow and landscape company. My name's Jack Jostes, and I look forward to talking with you next week on The Landscaper's Guide.
Show Notes:
???? Watch the full episode + transcript
https://landscapersguide.com/debrief-to-win-fighter-pilot-lessons-for-landscaping-leaders#video
???? Grab your Beef Jerky + Marketing Toolbox
https://landscapersguide.com/toolbox
???? Get Cujo's Book Debrief to Win
https://robertteschner.com/books/
???? Connect with Cujo Teschner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertteschner/
???? Learn about Bach Business Partners
https://www.bachbusinesspartners.com/
???? Join us at an upcoming Ramblin Jackson event
https://landscapersguide.com/events