INSIDE OUT EPISODE 1: INTRODUCTION

This is a podcast series called Inside Out for leaders and managers in vocational rehabilitation. The host, Greg Schmieg, shares his experiences and insights. He talks about his own experience with polio and how it shaped his career in rehabilitation. He emphasizes the importance of thinking outside the box and not being afraid to take risks for positive change. He encourages the listeners to reflect on their own management teams and determine if they have individuals who are willing to be in the arena and take risks. Schmieg believes that VR agencies have the ability to solve their own problems if they foster a culture of courage and innovation. Hey, welcome to Inside Out, a series of podcasts that I hope will be of some value for your professional career. This series is intended for leaders and managers in vocational rehabilitation, whether you're the head of a state VR agency or a mid-level manager, or even if you're in charge of an organization that provides services on behalf of state VR agencies. My goal is that each and every podcast will give you at least one nugget of useful information for you to consider for your career. I will try my best to keep each podcast no longer than 15 minutes max, because I understand how busy your schedule must be, but I also hope that the podcasts provide a little break in your busy day-to-day life. I will also try to make them as enjoyable and light-hearted as possible. But I know that what you do is serious business, and you can always use a break. So let me start by sharing a little about me. My name is Greg Schmieg, and I have been spending the majority of my career in vocational rehabilitation. I'm sure you've heard that phrase, what goes around comes around, or that life is full circle. Well, that fits me to a T. When I was four or five years old, not sure, I was diagnosed with a mild case of polio, and this was before there was a polio vaccine. Luckily, my case of polio only lasted two to three weeks, as best as I can remember. As I grew up, though, I completely forgot about my polio experience as a young boy, and I enjoyed a typical childhood, teenage years, young adulthood, time in the military, then college, and my first ventures into the world of work. Ironically, when I was 57 years old, I became the director of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, a 1,000-acre campus that had become famous for its treatment of polio under the ownership and leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who bought it in 1927, three years after he was diagnosed with polio, and where he spent a great deal of time during his four terms as President of the United States, and where he eventually died at the little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1945, exactly 10 years to the day before the polio vaccine was announced and introduced. Warm Springs is truly a remarkable and historic place, and I loved almost every day that I had the pleasure of being there. But on my very first day there, while walking across the campus for the first time to introduce myself and meet the staff, the memory of my own polio experience kind of popped into my head. I could remember my mom and dad taking me to a doctor's office in Kansas City, where we lived, and not being able to stand or walk across his exam room. And I remember the doctor telling my parents that I had poliomyelitis. And I can remember the look of concern on my mom and dad's faces, yet I had no idea what it meant at the time. That memory literally stopped me in my tracks as I walked across the campus of Warm Springs, and I said to myself, I get it, God. In that instant, I was the same person who once had polio as a young child, and now was the director of a historic place made famous by polio. My life had come full circle. But how did that happen? How did something that happened to me when I was four or five become the core of my career more than 50 years later? Was it coincidence? Well, it's hard to believe that. The odds would have been staggering. Was it predestined? Well, I hope not, because I'm a firm believer in free will and that we create our own future and our own destiny. Whatever it was, I am grateful for it, because in some odd way, it reaffirmed for me that I was on the right career path. Now, there were other moments like that in my career that, in hindsight, are probably equally significant, but too many to mention here. Every one of them, though, was uncomfortable at the time, but in hindsight, again, I was grateful to have had them. I kind of think of them as the guardrails on my career highway that kept me on track when I started to go adrift, which we all tend to do sometimes. I consider myself very blessed in my career, but what makes me tick and what gets me juiced is thinking outside of the box, trying to see things differently than the norm and hopefully helping others to do the same. I would rather push the envelope than stay the course. When I was in the Navy, the captain of our ship had a plaque outside of his stateroom that read, Tradition is our Responsibility. Now, Tradition is our Responsibility may be a great saying for the military, but in my humble opinion, it's really a bad saying for vocational rehabilitation. What it says is we don't transform, we don't improve, we don't change, we stay the course. The most difficult and disappointing moments in my career have been those situations where the legacy of tradition itself becomes the greatest obstacle to positive change, where people are afraid to take risks, where people are afraid to think outside the box or say something different for fear of going against the grain, where people continue to do the same thing over and over because that's the way it's always been done. To me, that is the challenge we now face in vocational rehabilitation after our first hundred plus years. President Theodore Roosevelt summed it up nicely in 1910 when he wrote The Man in the Arena. Part of it reads, It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit, he says, belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. The reason I share that reading with you is that I hope that you see yourself as the man or woman in the arena. Believe me, I have sat in your chair and I know firsthand the amount of dust and sweat and blood you endure. What used to frustrate me more than anything back then were those managers who never spoke up and never took a risk, those who would rather hold on dearly to the past rather than even considering something different. One of my friends and colleagues used to always say in those situations, quote, either change the people or change the people. I've been doing consulting since I retired from the state and there's a saying about consultants that what we do is basically borrow your watch and then tell you what time it is. To a great degree, I believe that's true. Consultants aren't any better or aren't any smarter than anyone else. Our difference is that we have the luxury of looking at your world without the built-in blinders. And here's the real kicker. I honestly believe that you can come up with better solutions than a consultant can. Consultants only visit your world, but you live in it every day. If you can learn to see your world without your blinders, you can be your own best consultant. As a consultant, what frustrates me the most is that organizations just want the answer, the solutions. But giving a VR agency the solution doesn't always work if the managers in that agency haven't put the effort into creating it and have no sense of ownership for it. I truly believe that VR agencies have all the talent and all the ability to solve their own problems if they fostered a culture like that of the man in the arena. That's why I've decided to call this podcast series Inside Out. The expression Inside Out dates from 1600 and has been used figuratively, such as, he turned his jacket inside out and revealed the hidden lining. So what I hope this podcast series enables you to do is to turn your thinking and your challenges somewhat inside out to reveal maybe some new perspectives, some new opportunities, the hidden lining that exists within your world of work. In each podcast, I hope to share with you some of my recollections from when I was sitting in your chair about the things I learned, most of which I learned the hard way, of course, as well as the things I wish I had learned or had done. One of the advantages of being older is that I can now look back quite openly at my highs and especially my lows without really any fear because I still like being the man in the arena. So let me ask you to do a little inside out reflecting right now. For the next, say, 10 to 20 seconds, I'd like you to just think about your leadership team or your management team. Visualize the people on your team that you directly supervise. It may be three, five, or seven people who sit on your team, hopefully not many more than seven. Picture each one, his or her name, and their particular role on your team. Now go ahead and just take this pause and visualize your team, each person on your team. Have you got the picture of your team in your mind? So now for the inside out part, as you picture each one of them, if you were to peel back, say, their demeanor, their work habits, how they behave during your team meetings, is there a hidden lining? Is each member of your team a man or a woman in the arena? Do they speak candidly without fear? Do they think outside the norm? Do they take risks? Are they problem solvers? Now this is by no means a formal test or anything like that. I'm simply asking you to do an internal gut check about each person on your management team. And here's the good news. If your gut check tells you that each one of the people on your team is truly a man or a woman in the arena, then congratulations to you. You've got a great team and you should be thankful. Plus, you should let them know how grateful you are more than you probably already do. Thank them for their courage to be in that arena and thank them for their willingness to see things differently and try something new. And you know, here's some more good news. Even if your gut check tells you that each member of your team is not necessarily the man or woman in the arena, I believe there's still the potential that they could become that. Remember, you can help change the people. I know from my own experience that I was able to learn a lot of different things about myself that shaped new ways of thinking and new ways of behaving that I never would have imagined. A little investment in each one of the members on your team may yield a great return on that investment. If I guess there's a point to this podcast that may be something for you to consider, it's this. Many of us tend to get into the rut of going along with the way things are, good or bad. We sometimes lose that passion we felt when we started our careers to be change agents, to make an impact where we work, to make the world better. There's enough stress in our day-to-day jobs to go against the grain and to point out those things that really could be better. Why make all the extra effort when we don't have to? Why be the man or woman in the arena? Well, I have one answer, because it's worth it. By challenging the norm and helping those we supervise to do the same does make a difference. It makes a difference for each of us personally in how we learn and how we perform in our career because it pushes us to be better. If you and your team are the man or woman in the arena, I applaud you in them because your voice and your actions will transform vocational rehabilitation for the next 100 years. If you're not that, there is still plenty of time and you can change. I want to thank each of you for listening to today's podcast and I hope you will join me next time for the next episode of Inside Out when our topic will be creating a team of winners. Until then, be focused and be good. Thank you.