Empowering Frontline Leaders: Strategies and Tools for Success | Noel Massie

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Why Investing in Mentorship Boosts Organizational Success

Today we explore how organizations can better equip first-time leaders through structured mentorship, clear communication of values, and practical leadership frameworks. It highlights the critical need for resources tailored specifically to frontline managers stepping into roles with significant pressure and expectations. The conversation emphasizes that investing in mentorship and targeted leadership training is essential to developing confident, effective leaders across all organizational levels.

How do you prepare a first-time leader to succeed when everyone’s watching? 

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Bill speaks with Noel Massie, former VP of US Operations at UPS and author of the upcoming book “Congrats, You’ve Been Promoted” (June 2025). Noel spent his distinguished career at UPS mentoring new leaders and guiding them through the challenging transition from individual contributor to manager. Recognizing a critical gap in available resources
specifically designed for newly promoted frontline leaders, he decided to write the book he wished he’d had earlier in his career.

Noel introduces powerful frameworks, including the “4 by 5 method” and the “BEST principle,” designed to help young leaders navigate complex leadership moments confidently. Drawing on his experiences—such as leading teams where individuals often had decades more experience—he highlights the essential role clear communication and defined expectations play in managing teams effectively.

Throughout our conversation, Noel underscores the responsibility of seasoned executives to engage directly with frontline staff, nurturing the next generation of leaders through active mentorship. He shares personal stories that reveal why mentorship and leadership development became not just his professional focus, but his enduring passion long after retirement.

This episode offers invaluable insights for leaders at any stage, emphasizing that great leadership is fundamentally about investing in others.

Three Key Takeaways

Leadership Development Requires Intentionality – Effective leadership doesn’t happen by accident. Leaders must intentionally communicate their values, clearly define expectations, and invest in ongoing training, especially for newly promoted managers stepping into challenging roles for the first time.

Mentorship is Central to Successful Leadership – Great leaders actively mentor their teams, engaging directly with individuals regardless of their position within the organization. Noel emphasizes that the greatest legacy a leader can leave is measured by the success of the leaders they help develop.

Practical Frameworks Empower New Leaders – Noel’s “4 by 5 method” and “BEST principle” offer structured, actionable guidance for handling difficult leadership moments. These frameworks help young leaders maintain control, build their confidence, and foster positive team dynamics—critical elements for successful frontline leadership.

If you enjoyed this conversation on how to successfully prepare new leaders and the importance of mentorship, I highly recommend going back to our very first episode featuring Chester Elton. Chester dives deep into how recognition, mentorship, and intentional leadership practices shape thriving organizational cultures. Together, these two episodes offer powerful insights and actionable strategies for building and supporting effective leaders at every level of your organization.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you prepare a first-time leader for success when the stakes are high, the leader themselves are new and possibly young, and the team is counting on them? Noel Massey faced that question countless times during his career at UPS. First, as an emerging leader himself, then as an active mentor, and finally as an executive sponsor of mentorship and leadership development. A few years ago, Noel retired from UPS as their VP of U.S. His deep interest in developing first-time managers still lingered in his mind long after retirement. During his career, Noel had gifted business books for his mid-level and senior managers. He even ran a book club for managers, but he knew he lacked a book written For his first time managers. So that’s when Noel decided to write that book himself. His new book, Congrats You’ve Been Promoted will be released in June of 2025. And so I sat down with Noel to talk about his journey from senior executive to practicing thought leader. We discuss his book and why he was so deeply driven to write this book in his retirement. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Noel.

Noel Massie Thank you, Bill. I’m pleased to be on your podcast today and looking forward to our conversation. So.

Bill Sherman I want to begin with a question, you had a very accomplished career at UPS leading operations. My question is this, in retirement, you decided to write a book. Some people go out to the golf course, some people, you know, build boats or things. What was it that told you you needed to build or write a book?

Noel Massie My idea for this book came about 10 years ago while I was still in my career, Bill. And the impetus for that was the vast amount of promotions we were making in my organization of 400 plus thousand employees served by 30 plus thousand leaders. And with the velocity of retirements, we were promoting one of my biggest challenges as US operations manager was succession planning. And so we were promoting people probably before they were truly ready for it. And so as I looked at the future at that moment, I knew that a book for that generation, Gen Z millennial was a necessary helpful thing so that they would be successful in their new role.

Bill Sherman And in our previous conversation, you mentioned how you would host book club internally for your more senior managers and pick books and have them discuss. But you said you saw a gap of there wasn’t a book for the frontline manager and the newly promoted frontline manager.

Noel Massie I used books often with my teams, along with many educational platforms to develop their skill set period, end of story, to give them an opportunity to learn the science of leadership. It’s not rocket science, but it is science. There’s a theme to it, and the foundation of my book goes there. It’s called The Terms and Conditions of Value-Based Leadership is the anchor of book actually and it’s intended to teach leaders not just new leaders but any leader that in order to succeed with an individual or a group you need to acknowledge that everyone has expectations which ultimately become their value based terms and conditions to have a relationship at the end of the day it just that’s how it works so my book goes there and the books that were missing to me were the down in the weeds books The book that would teach the 27-year-old who had a 60-year old employee under them how to address that person in a way that was positive and influential on behavior, science, if you will, as their boss.

Bill Sherman Well, and as we’ve been talking over the last couple of weeks, I was thinking about Michael Watkins has a book called the first 90 dates, which is for senior leaders, mostly CEOs who are stepping into the role and their first 90 days being critical on setting vision, getting the team aligned, all of that stuff, and like you said, there’s a gap. If you’re a 20 something, you know, newly minted manager, and you’re telling people two or three times your age, what needs to be done? There could be some insecurity. There’s could be, some angst and stress as well in terms of how do I do this? I’ve never had to do this before. It was always Mr. So-and-so when I was talking to someone twice or three times of my age.

Noel Massie That’s exactly right. Most books today are for CEOs, the person that wants to be the next top tech entrepreneur, the next Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, the Next CEO, most books are for people looking to become that thing. There aren’t any books, at least that I’ve read, that have engagements where there’s a 50, 60-year-old teamster, unionized employee, they have a lot of layers of protection around their job employing. So they tend to push the envelope a lot further than people that are not in that same circumstance. And there’s a 25, 27 year old and they have line of freight drivers and they ask the driver, I need you, or I would like you, however they wanna say it to do X, Y, or Z. And the person goes, no, I’m not doing that. And in that moment, they need a structure that does a couple of things. Number one, keeps them in control of the moment. Number two, gives them confidence that they can handle this thing. And number three, keep the employee’s confidence at a high level. They don’t wanna create a bad relationship in a moment. That person could have woke up on the wrong side of the bed today and I saw it a million times. And in fact, I like to say this last thing, when I was 19 years old, newly promoted college student, I was a college student. I was a working person to get through tuition. I was working at night in a distribution hub. And I actually had that happen to me where I had a 50 something year old person refuse a directive and I was 19. And because I had really great manager, I knew in the moment how to handle that circumstance. And that person ultimately complied with the request that I had administered for them to do. After objecting to it pretty strenuously, actually. And I was able to handle that situation in that moment. And I had about 20 employees watching me. So it wasn’t just isolated. Had I failed in that movement, I would have failed as a leader with those other 20.

Bill Sherman Right, right. And it also seems like that moment, because you’re, you’re pointing back to that in your career and you’ve talked about other defining moments in life for you as well, and we can get to those, but that moment of the first time you basically had a leadership challenge or were challenged as a leader. That became formative for you. It sounds like, and I’d love to hear from you. It influenced how you led going forward the rest of your career and even stayed with you after you retired. Is that true?

Noel Massie That’s absolutely correct. I had the great fortune of working for an organization that was deeply entrenched in value-based leadership. And we began learning that at the very beginning of our careers as newly promoted leaders, that there were certain pillars of the value equation that just mattered. Would no matter whether you were the CEO or you were frontline supervisor, they just mattered and your integrity, your ethical, your views around ethics. Your views around valuing human beings and employees, that those things ultimately went out when you’re a leader in a group, particularly over time. And so mentorship is critically important to development, but the most important thing to development is that you understand you need to do it, that you need self-develop, that you own how good you’re gonna be at something. And that’s kind of an interesting thought, Well, you know, you look at young people and. Anything they have as a hobby and today, video games dominate. They spend a lot of time trying to be excellent at that video game or a sport, basketball, football. Well, leadership’s no different. If you’re not practicing the skills of what it takes to be an effective leader, you’re gonna be good at being an effective leaders. And mentors, along with self-development desires is a really powerful way to get better. In my book, emphasizes that completely.

Bill Sherman And you’ve alluded to that your, what sounded like your first leaders slash mentor in the distribution center had helped equip you for that moment of stress, right? So you acknowledged, Hey, when I was young, I had a mentor. And then last time we talked, you were talking about your team and your role as a mentor, when you were the leader over North America, right from an operations perspective. So how did your perspective of mentorship change and evolve as you took on the role of mentor and mentor not only to directs, but then also a full organization.

Noel Massie Well, of course, in the beginning of my career, I didn’t value mentorship highly. I was being mentored. I valued it from the direction of I was getting great support and coaching and encouragement from mentors. And then, of courses, the time went on and I aged and became a higher level manager through my career. I understood the responsibility to provide the same thing. You know, there’s a quote. That really foundationally for me drives a lot of my ethos. And that is one which I heard, but that was left for the organization by the founder of UPS named James E. Casey. And he made this quote and I heard this in my early 20s. I think it was a 22 or three, first time I heard it. And it said, you can’t hope to get more than you give. That applies to everything in your life. If you don’t give, a substantial amount to anything you want to do or benefit from. You can’t hope to get more out of that than you give to it. But the same thing holds true with people. You can hope to get more from people than you gave to them. So when it comes to leadership, if you expect the people under you to be effective leaders, then you need to give a lot to them and not expect them to give you, especially small business owners, which I met. With over a hundred of those a year annually is that you have to give if you expect to get and of yourself is really the foundation of that. What are you giving to your team? How are you supporting them? How are your coaching them every day? And why if you’re not doing that would you expect them to give you great outcomes?

Bill Sherman So I want to stay on this concept on give before you get, and I want to contextualize it around this book, right? The book I see in many ways is a gift to a newly appointed first time leader, also for other leaders, but you’ve written and filled a gap, right. But you’re not sitting as an executive anymore. Your dashboard on metrics and performance, that needle isn’t going to move now that you’ve stepped away, but you’re giving this gift. I mean, this is a large chunk of your time and it will go into the writing of the book and how you rewrote it several times. But this wasn’t, oh, I’ll dash this off in a couple of weeks and call it done. This has been a passion project for you.

Noel Massie For me, it really came down to, what are you leaving of yourself behind? What legacy are you living on this planet? And that matters significantly to me in my life. Number one is I feel a deep responsibility to serve others. It’s what I do. I mean, when you look at my life, predicting the last, that word of it. It’s been fundamentally focused on how can I help others become better at whatever it is they want to become better at in the leadership category that is not just that I sit on for nonprofit boards.

Bill Sherman The Ennenberg in a minute, but yes.

Noel Massie Yeah, but that’s really the bottom line is I think on a daily basis in a way that and I’m fortunate and I was taught by great mentors that that’s really ultimately the greatest gift you’re gonna give and life is support to other people and their pursuits goals etc, and I had the benefit of having that given to me, right? So I wouldn’t be the person I am today hadn’t The mentors I had, which the list is too long. The minute you mentioned one, you’re going to leave some of them out. Right. Uh, but I had some really fantastic individuals in my life as a young person at 19 and 20, and that continued all the way until I retired. Uh, and it’s just a natural outgrowth of the way that I’ve been built.

Bill Sherman In terms of legacy, you want to give more than you’ve received. But it also sounds like in your mind, you’ve received a lot, so that’s a pretty big challenge to keep giving.

Noel Massie But it’s a requirement. I am really a believer, strong believer that your life is going to reflect what you give. That’s what it’s gonna reflect. People can acknowledge that or not, but at the end of the day, that’s gonna be a truth. Is that when you make investments in others, investments in your community, from that perspective, which is ironic to me, people understand financial investment really well. If I don’t invest, I’m not gonna get. Right. Right. And I say, it’s no different with life and humans. If you don’t give, you’re not going to get. That’s just how this thing’s going to go. And I raised my sons here and they heard that more often than they cared to when they would, when they, when, they were teenagers complaining about something, I’d go, well, what’d you give it? You know, did you give, it you’re full. Did you, why should you get that? I mean, in your mind’s eye, why should you, get that and, uh, and it works.

Bill Sherman So how long did you spend writing this book? And I include the rewriting time because we talked about that. So tell the story of how this book came to be, please.

Noel Massie So when I retired, I had thoughts around the book, but no draft. So I leaned on people in the academic community who I had close relationships with, having been on a number of numerous boards and advisory committees at universities, USC, Claremont University, and the Drucker School of Management specifically in Claremount, California. I had a lot of connections in those universities. Anyway, so I got a book coach. I was asking professors who they were using and that led me to the book coach I ended up with. I had one and then I changed. And so I wrote the book completely with my first book coach with my second book coach, Mary Curran Hackett who lives in Cincinnati. She’s been in the business for 30 years. I sent her the first draft and it was 13 chapters. And she sent it back to me and said, I can tell that you have a lot to say around leadership. But if you want to write a book that’s going to be true to an author’s expectations we need to do this over And so I rewrote the book a second time With Mary which really ended up being like writing the book four more times because if you look at the page count I think I wrote like a thousand pages to come up with the 250 that we ended up with The fact is, is that Mary Curran Hackett was my coach. Everyone needs a coach. Even Michael Jordan had a coach, not that I’m saying I’m that, but I believe very firmly that everyone needs a coat. Everyone, I don’t care who you are, what you do. And so I was blessed enough with the skillset to understand that. So I immediately looked for a coach and I found Mary and she was exceptional. And so, I spent four years on this book, writing this book. Fast is not better. Hurried is not necessarily good and that was my approach to it and candidly I’m glad it took That long because I came up with thoughts in the second year writing this book. I didn’t have in the first year

Bill Sherman And I think I hear that from a number of authors that the journey of writing forces you to get really clear on what it is you’re trying to say. And sometimes it’s not the first time you say it, but the 50th or the 60th. You’re like, Oh, that’s how I express that.

Noel Massie Think the foundational thought comes in the beginning immediately. For instance, I have Many things I say in the leadership role and they’re in the book as foundational opinions comments that I would throw out there for instance, here’s a couple of my key ones I Say if there’s any question, there’s no question When people come to you if they have a doubt I go if there is any doubt. There’s no doubt. Don’t do it Ponder it for a while. Don’t run into that if you have a second thought There’s a reason why it’s it it ran in front of your first thought

Bill Sherman Mm-hmm.

Noel Massie That’s one of my key cliches that I use to talk to people. You never get a casual moment in leadership. That’s another one. And I say that to young leaders who say that you’re always being evaluated. People are better served as leaders when they understand that every action they take in front of their team, their team is evaluating it, period. Whether it’s kindness, whether it’s being stern, whether it being insensitive, everything you do is evaluated. To say that in my book, I go, you’re always being evaluated. You’re always on stage. It’s foundational. And then I talk about why that is. But, but I have a number of colloquialisms, if you will, that I personally have used over 40 years that are in the book.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast.

Bill Sherman Well, there’s colloquialisms, but there’s also a framework. And I want you to talk to that in terms of it’s almost a matrix for people in the moment to be able to make a decision in terms. Where are we in a moment of disagreement versus who am I working with? Can you speak to that for a moment?

Noel Massie Yeah, the first part of the book is value based. So in the first part of the book, I talked about the importance of intentionally stating your values verbally to your team, like ethics and integrity and the importance of fairness and how that’s even viewed by the individual. Second part of the book which is where you’re going is tactical. Okay, now how to stop, right? So I have a method in the book called the four by five method. And the four by five method is a frame. And it teaches the leader that in a moment, here are four perspectives you need to choose in a movement. And here are for intensities to apply in that moment. And that’s a frame, and it helps the leader be able to understand how to spontaneously react to a moment. Then I have what’s called the best principle. And actually the best principal is a principle that can be applied to almost anything we do in our life with another human being. And the best principle, be specific, meaning be concise and intentional. When you’re engaging with an employee, why are we meeting? Be specific. I’m here to train you how to drive a forklift. Expect the best. I know this engagement will turn out great. I’m going to expect the best, and that gives employee confidence that I have confidence in them. Stick to the objective. We’re here to learn how to drive a forklift, not to talk about the Washington commander game last night. So stick to the objectives. And at the end of the day, test commitment is follow up. Did the employee learn what you intended to teach, right? So then the book, the second part of the book is a frame for the person to actually utilize with practice.

Bill Sherman And it really works and here’s the connective tissue that I want to ask. You said you have almost these aphorisms or sayings that you were known for as a leader, and now you’re talking about whether it’s the best framework or the four by five framework, when did those frameworks are evolved or they, while you were leading and were you teaching them to your team or was it in the process of reflecting on what you did as a leader in in the process of building this book that the frameworks emerge.

Noel Massie In the early 80s, I attended a leadership school that the organization had established and all new leaders would go through this school. And then in the 90s that evolved dramatically and I happened to be a mid-level manager at the time and I was assigned to help develop the curriculum for the leadership school. So I learned a lot of the content you see in the book in that time. I was a young supervisor. That’s the first time in the 80s where I learned the four by five method if you will But it was called the three by five I added a fourth skill set to it and then in the early 90s is where I learn the best principle Candidly, but a skill like the seven steps of effective training. That was a personal value I read in a book early in my leadership career and that really made sense to me and it stuck with me So… The book is a compilation of many dimensions of experience, but the skills based part of it are things that I learned in my career early bottom line and taught them to my to taught them to my teams on a consistent basis through. Especially during the period of my career, I became a president in 1997 that my objective when I was the leader of five, six, seven thousand people was one thing I wanted the best. I wanted the most highly valued team I could develop, ethics, integrity, but I wanted them to be the best trained team in the organization. And our saying would be, our people will be the best-trained individuals in the company. We will invest, invest, invest, and invest in their skills, in the story. They’ll bring themselves to the workplace. We give them the skills for success.

Bill Sherman So Noel, you mentioned in our last conversation about that investment of training and how many people have risen to the role of president that you had led, and I think you shared that with some pride, you want to speak to that a little bit and because that speaks to the results of the work that you did.

Noel Massie When you were a president in my organization, there were president, to give some context for the listeners, a president would run a state, Texas. So you’d have the UPS president of Texas. If it was small geographies, they might have three or four states like Louisiana, Alabama would be combined to be a business unit. But we had a geographic footprint. But there were, when I became a president, 97, 50 something, because you look at the states, right? And then over time, that evolved down to 20 or so. But if you were president and you had one person on your staff, one mid-level manager get promoted to president, that was a strong source of pride. And if you had won, right? And so if you have two or three, you were considered, wow, this person is really developing the future. In my time as a president, I had over 23 individuals who were on my staff. Become presidents, or hire actually. And I was very, very proud of that statistic candidly, still am to this day, that I had that many individuals who were in my business unit as the head of whatever they were, operations managers, CFOs, it doesn’t matter, and they became president was significant. As a matter of fact, I have three… Individuals that worked on my staff that after they left the organization became CEOs and other companies

Bill Sherman And I think that is a way of whether formally or informally measuring the legacy of a leader is the leaders that you help others become. And I. Think that’s that beautiful connection between your career and the topic of the book, there’s a through line in my mind on that, I want to ask you a couple of questions about the book going forward. Where do you see it going? And I know you don’t do things without a plan. So how does this book get out into the world and make impact? What’s the strategy for that?

Noel Massie So this environment being a podcast is one of them, of course, where I don’t need help to get the book in the space is what the organization I worked with. There’s 12,000 frontline leaders in that organization and I’ve already socialized it pretty thoroughly there and it’s getting tremendous support. But at the end of the day, it’s really about being in front of Space like podcasts radio shows etc. So I hired a firm that has a responsibility for setting those kinds of things up And it really would you know when I wrote the book I didn’t write it to be a generally distributed US national piece of content, but The question that was asked to me early in the release of the book process was well, no I mean, if there’s a young person in Miami, Florida, or, you know, Bristol, Connecticut, would you want them to have your book? And I was like, well, shiver, right? They might be in a grocery store stocking shells, but of course, and they’re like, well, then you need to do some things to spread the news that you’ve written this book. And I’m like, okay, that makes sense to me. And so I have two pathways. One obviously is my existing relationship. I was chairman of the board of the Los Angeles chamber of commerce. There’s 3000 businesses as members, right? So my social currency in Los Angeles is actually very high. I was on the orange County business council. So again, Southern California is very high and when you look at the boards I sit on, right, a lot of exposure. Uh, and so, so I do have pathways. Uh, in order to market the book to a broader audience. And my intention is to continue to do that ongoing. Uh, so once the book releases June 3rd, and the book can be found on Barnes and Noble currently or Amazon, or go into my website, noelmassey.com. I will continue to sit on podcasts. I wrote an article in CEO world magazine just last week. I was on a radio show in Los Angeles just yesterday with Renee Frasier called Why Women. And that was something that she approached me on candidly. She’s one of my references on the back cover of the book, you can see it. And so I intend to continue to push it out, but you know, I didn’t write this book, Bill candidly, because I was looking for this to become a big business. Okay, that’s not why, right, right right, no.

Bill Sherman Take that step further. You wrote it and your dream is clearly not for it to sit in a warehouse somewhere or on a shelf. That’s right. So talk about what’s going to bring you joy from this book, you know, cause it took a lot of work and a lot of your time to create.

Noel Massie What’s going to bring me more joy, because I’ve already received some, is when I have a young person who read the book, because when, before the book was released, I worked with a number of groups to do seminars with the under 40 crowd that worked in their units. And I had 20, 30 individuals go through a seminar to a person. The feedback was very incredibly positive about how this helped me. This is something I feel is going to help me become a better leader. So if I get that feedback from one person, okay, if I give that feedback from one-person to here, this was successful to me, candidly, is that I’m just looking to help young leaders be successful in their pursuit to become leaders. And there’s just not a lot of people who care about the front line of the business.

Bill Sherman Especially, and I say this from experience, those who have reached senior executive level, you wind up either focused on investor relations or, you know, business strategy, your head’s in the clouds a little bit, right. Rather than that, you know, 20 year old who’s showing up for a shift and unloading the sea cans out of the plane. And making sure that the team is getting everything turned in time. Be so the planes can depart that focus on the ground and that ground level is exceptional, but it also speaks to who you are as a leader.

Noel Massie Well, I’d like to think so. I recently had a conversation with a CEO of a company that we were having coffee just catching up on a couple of things. And, you know, one of the comments that that he made was, you know, young people today, blah, blah. Blind, actually, ironically, he didn’t know I’d written this book. OK, because we were just friends and he said he hadn’t seen it right. And he says young people that say, you know, every generation has that. Yours doesn’t get to be an exception. I’m good. You go back right when you were 22 You know people were complaining about the Xers or the boomer exactly right? I said it happens in every generation. I said, but what future isn’t determined? What future isn’t determined by the young? Right so leaders who Engage on the ground floor. No matter how CEO done that If they’re missing the opportunity to be on the ground floor and walk over to a newly or even a three year, you know, I say new is zero to three years is new to me. Okay, so the leaders on the front line and go over to them and say, hey, you I’m Bob and who are you? Cause they have 10,000 people, they don’t know every leader I believe you mean. They say, oh Bob, who are your, I’m Lauren. Okay, Lauren, so tell me about yourself. Leaders who get caught up in hierarchal barriers, they don’t get it. Just because you’re five levels above the floor doesn’t mean you should be in any way, shape or form worried about how the other four levels below you are gonna be worried about you going to the ground floor and what did she say to him? Right, right. You have to get rid of that. And when they come to learn that as a leader or CEO, that when you’re on the floor, It’s to help them, the other four levels, with competence with that level, then they’ll support that, visibly support that. And that was the way I spent my day. I always started my day, I never went a day actually, and I’m being very serious about this, where that level of leadership wasn’t a top of mind for me, okay? I didn’t put the CFO in any uncomfortable position or the director of human resources who reported to me, But you, you better know, that I knew- who the person that was hiring people in that office that thought they were like not even, you know, in anyone’s mind’s eye, I was important for me to let them know they mattered, that they were the flesh and bone of the organization.

Bill Sherman And what I’m hearing from you, and I hope the listeners can hear as well is as you start talking about that front line, your, your energy popped. I can see as we record on zoom, there’s a spark in the eye. This is who you are in many ways. There’s, there is a deep piece of you in this conversation as well as, and I haven’t read the book, I would assume. The passion that fubles this book and this project.

Noel Massie That’s right. No, no question. When I retired, I received over 400 letters, emails, however you want to put it, from frontline individuals, managers or supervisors. And to the person, they obviously wouldn’t take the time to do that if they didn’t have something right that they wanted you to know. But those letters to this day, they’re in a You know, retirement dinner where the executives all come or give her a ride. No, I mean those 400 plus letters that were sent to me saying, thank you for elevating my life. Thank you for helping my skill development, blah, blah blah. I mean, that’s really, you know, the thing that moves me candidly is, is, there. Right. And I remember, I remember being a young leader and the president And this is a true story. His name was Joe Blanchard. It’s the only name I’m going to mention, but Joe Blancheard is no longer with us. But he was the president of the unit when I was 19 in the Bay Area, in Oakland, California. And Joe made a habit of coming out of his office and walking the distribution floor. And he would come over to us young individuals. I was probably 20 when the first time he did this. But in any event, he would just stand here and talk to you. You know, how you doing? And he knew me. And I think about this. Here was the president of an organization with this huge responsibility of like 8,000 people. And he gave, and he’s talked to me. I had like 30 people under me. And he would come talk to me and my manager was never offended by that. The mid-level division manager was never offended by that, the region level managers were never offended. Joe would come out and talk to us young folks. Because he just wanted us to know that we mattered. And I patterned my leadership style off of him.

Bill Sherman That’s beautiful story. I have one last question for you before we wrap up is you’ve been an executive. You’ve been a business guy. You’ve worked and sat on boards of very large charities. There are many terms I could use to describe you. Okay. I could call you someone who’s a thought leader or someone who practices thought leadership. My question is… Do you embrace that title? Do you go, no, no that’s not me? If I call you a thought leader, how do you respond?

Noel Massie I absolutely believe I am. I say, please, I, I embrace that. I believe that first of all, I think when you’re in a group, right. You can’t be a thought leader unless you’re talking to other people, right? Right. And then you just talking to yourself, right, I think the important thing about being a thought leader and contributing to anything is respecting the others in the group that are contributing to is having enough humility to recognize that you’re one individual. You’re part of the process. You’re not the process and I learned that as well in my career from a number of really great leaders. You know, one thing I always observed and I do want to add this is that when I would be in a meeting, I always made it an objective, particularly when I reached like say 30 from 30 up, see who was the most respected and smartest person in the room and they were always the individual that Listened well. Before speaking, right? And that when they finally weighed in, it sounded different. They had a way of phrasing things that was just different than the person that wanted to be the most obvious opinion at the table. And so I thought about that in terms of impact, right. And so if you are going to be a thought leader, then you’re gonna approach things thoughtfully. And you’re going to make sure that when you speak, you have digested as many opinions on the matter as you can.

Bill Sherman I want to thank you for joining us today for a wonderful conversation. Good luck on the launch of the book. And I look forward to continuing conversations in the future. This has been a delight.

Noel Massie Well, you know, Bill, I really enjoyed our discussion today. I, you’re your podcast on thought leadership. There’s just not enough of that kind of content out there. So much of the content to do today is already pre-determined and directional. Right. It’s just confirmation bias type stuff. And to be able to get on a show where it’s about thought leadership, right. Being thoughtful in leadership. You know, is really a profound concept and I would thank you for having it and wish you all of the success going forward with your listeners and guests that have that as a mindset.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game, and thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights. Take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.