Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future
Hosted by Maureen Metcalf
Conversations with global thought leaders on leadership, culture, and innovation—designed for executives navigating complexity and building resilient organizations.
Let Others Decide: How DHL’s COO Shares Authority
Episode Description
Authority is reframed as a leadership resource that should be intentionally distributed rather than tightly controlled. Drawing on executive experience leading global operations at DHL, the discussion explores how empowering people closest to the work improves responsiveness, accountability, and organizational performance. Effective leadership is presented as creating the conditions for sound decisions throughout the organization rather than concentrating decision-making at the top.
Key Takeaways
- Distributed authority enables organizations to respond more effectively to changing conditions.
- Accountability is strengthened when decision rights are aligned with operational responsibility.
- Trust is a prerequisite for empowering teams to make consequential decisions.
- Decision bottlenecks often arise from leadership structures rather than capability gaps.
- Scalable performance depends on developing leadership capacity throughout the organization.
Why This Episode Matters
It demonstrates how decision rights and leadership design directly influence organizational agility, execution quality, and the ability to operate effectively at scale.
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Episode Content:
DHL’s North America Supply Chain COO Let His VP Decide
Mike McLellan, COO of DHL Supply Chain North America, on what it takes to support a sound decision you wouldn’t have made yourself.
Your team brings you a plan. They’ve studied the problem, considered the trade-offs, and proposed a workable approach.
It looks great, except…it’s not what you had in mind. You would do it differently.
What happens next says a lot about how much you truly trust your teams, particularly how much authority your team leaders actually have.
In our podcast with Mike McLellan, Chief Operating Officer of DHL Supply Chain North America, he described that exact situation in his own recent experience. One of his vice presidents proposed a reorganization within her area. Mike had a different structure in mind. When she asked for his view, he chose not to offer his competing plan.
“Your view is different than mine, but mine’s not better,” he explained. She knows her vertical best, so Mike told her, “Go execute your view.”
That’s a consequential leadership choice. By his own admission, Mike likes control. And the accountability remains his. But he also recognized that his preference was insufficient reason to override someone else’s judgment.
The Moment Delegation Gets Real
Delegation is quite comfortable when your team makes the same decision you would have made.
The harder test comes when that team chooses a different (yet sound) approach. You might see the merits, but your ego pushes you to reject or revise it. Perhaps your version just feels familiar. Or your way is easier to execute. Or—most commonly—you simply want your experience reflected in the outcome.
Unquestionably, legitimate reasons to intervene exist. A proposal might overlook a material risk, conflict with strategy, or create consequences elsewhere in the organization. Your wider perspective still does matter.
But if every sound plan must be revised until it resembles your own, your team’s authority remains conditional on agreement. Rubber-stamping your ideas isn’t real delegation of authority. Over time, people spend more effort anticipating your preferred answer instead of providing the judgment you hired them to exercise.
Letting Go When Accountability Says No
One hard truth seems to stand in your way: Senior executives cannot simply step away from the consequences. They retain accountability, answering for performance, financial commitments, customer relationships, and the people affected by organizational decisions.
The challenge is to remain accountable while allowing others meaningful room to lead.
Mike describes several practices that support this at DHL: experienced operators, operational reporting, leadership checks and balances, and coordinated attention to issues that require greater rigor. Those practices give senior leaders visibility into the business without requiring every decision to reach the COO.
“If you have a very rigid structure of approvals and have to roll every decision uphill,” he says, “you’re not just going to fail. You’re going to fail consistently.” It makes sense; today’s chaotic climate requires better Decision Velocity. Executive attention slows things down, so it can’t be the prerequisite for every action.
Giving people authority requires work long before the decision arrives: developing their capability, establishing expectations, and creating enough visibility to recognize when support or intervention is actually needed…not your own issue with letting go.
Letting Go of Omniscience: Your Perspective Has Limits
Your senior role does give you a broader perspective than what your teams experience. Senior leaders have access to information others don’t. You see connections across functions, competing demands on resources, and implications for the enterprise.
Your team members, however, spend more time inside their particular businesses. That gives them a more detailed and nuanced view of their focus area than you can hold. Mike puts this plainly: “They are in their vertical 100% of the time. I am not.”
He describes managing eight or nine different areas while also attending to the business across North America and globally. His initial judgment may be informed, but the breadth required means he can’t carry the depth of someone working continuously in one area.
“There are times when I am pretty sure I’m right about something,” he said, “and in five minutes I can be given a perspective that proves that I’m not.”
That acknowledgment gives colleagues a reason to contribute what they know. It confirms their expertise can influence decisions, even when it challenges a senior leader’s first impression.
Growth Girds Trust
Delegation also depends on who is ready to receive authority.
Mike is candid about the pressure growth creates. Organizations often promote people before they are ready, or bring in leaders who do not fit the culture. Expanding the business increases the need for capable decision-makers precisely when there may be less time to develop them.
That makes leadership development part of execution.
A leader needs enough understanding to evaluate trade-offs, enough context to recognize consequences beyond their own area, and enough confidence to ask for help when a decision exceeds their experience. The senior exec’s role therefore includes building those abilities and recognizing where they are missing. This key step ensures trust becomes sustainable.
Question Yourself at Team Meetings
The next time someone presents a plan that differs from yours, pause before offering your alternative.
Ask yourself:
- What specific risk or weakness concerns me?
- What does this person know that I may be missing?
- Does this decision genuinely require my authority?
- If the approach is sound, can I support its execution without making it my own?
- And, be honest here: how much of my reaction comes from my ego?
Sometimes those questions reveal a legit reason to intervene. Sometimes they reveal that the plan is ready, and the only real obstacle is your personal preference.
Mike’s example offers a practical standard: recognize a sound approach, respect the person equipped to lead it, and give them the opportunity to deliver. You’ll soon discover how much stronger your team becomes when you learn to let go.
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Resources:
Learn more about DHL on their website: https://www.dhl.com/. You can also contact Mike directly on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-mclellan-81227a3/.
Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.
Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.
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Guest(s):
Guest(s) Bio:
Mike McLellan is Chief Operating Officer of DHL Supply Chain North America, where he leads operational excellence across the region, supporting both established operations and new business. He serves on the division’s North America Board and Global Operations Board.
Mike brings extensive operational experience in big-box retail and e-commerce. Since joining DHL in 2015, he has helped expand key operations and strengthen collaboration across business functions. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville.
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Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership: Co-creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, CEO and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where leadership meets innovation and strategy becomes results. The last time Mike McClellan sat down with me, he described his operating environment as one word: chaos.
Tariff announcements shifting week to week, ports going quiet, customers frozen in wait and see mode.
This is not a logistics problem. This is a leadership problem that happens to show up first in logistics. My guest is Mike McClellan, chief operating officer at DHL Supply Chain for North America. He also started his career as a temporary forklift driver, which means he’s seen the system from every altitude that exists. So Mike, welcome back.
Mike: Thanks, Maureen. Thanks for having me. And every time you mention that I used to be a forklift driver, I think back about how nice that was and how [00:01:00] easy it was to navigate that world versus what we’re going through now. I think it’s an interesting view of where we’re at compared to probably a little over a year ago when we were talking about tariff implications and the business.
We had a year last year with wait and see. We are not waiting and seeing anymore. Customers have gotten used to the chaos, have learned to navigate it, and I would say we are full steam ahead.
We’re starting to navigate new businesses, new customers, and really learn how to come out of what we came out of before and get into this new world, an even newer world.
Maureen: Let’s start with the honest version of your week. You’ve talked about wait and see, move to significant growth. When we last talked, you’d been in the C- O-O seat for about a year, and you called the environment chaos.
Mike: Yeah, let’s be perfectly clear. I didn’t cause all the chaos. I’m just learning how to navigate through it. If I look over the last year what’s happened, we went from a pause to just chaos in a [00:02:00] different way, and that’s growth chaos. Good problem to have But with that problem comes things that become challenges. How do we get the right leadership in place to absorb the growth?
How do we get the right people in place? How do we navigate successfully with the culture that we have? DHL has a very strong culture, something that we adhere to very tightly. It’s the one thing that I love about the company the most is the strong culture that we have.
But when you grow at the pace that we’re growing, there’s always challenges with bringing in the right people. Sometimes we over-promote people. Sometimes we bring in people that don’t fit culturally. I think the other thing is that due to the fact that we now are all navigating the chaos together and the extreme growth that we’re going through, it’s really requiring navigating our customers successfully through.
Moving too fast is almost as bad as not moving at all . And that’s what we’re seeing, is that customers now are maybe later in the decision process. Everything is done around their sales cycles.
We talk about peaks. A [00:03:00] peak is a moving target these days. Our peak isn’t just Black Friday. We can’t think in terms of a Black Friday peak. Depending on the customer base, it can be flu season with our life sciences folks. It could be back to school with clothing and other types of customers there.
We have Black Friday, a peak of course, and getting ready for that because we all know that, especially with e-com around, there’s a lot of moving peaks. I heard a term for the first time the other day, it’s not Black Friday anymore, it’s Black November. The sales cycles have started, and I experienced this with one of our customers that I was embedded with here at, at DHL for quite a while, where their peak sales really started the Sunday and Monday before Black Friday.
And the other thing is AI, how are we using AI in our businesses? How do we use those AI agents to make our teams more efficient?
We take great pride in the fact that we’ve never had significant event that’s put a customer base down. We get attacked [00:04:00] every day. I hear the numbers. It’s in the thousands or hundreds of thousands of attacks every day that we successfully rebuff.
Maureen: So here’s a number that stopped me. According to the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates, May was the busiest month at major US ports at roughly 2.24 million containers.
What did May actually look like inside of your buildings compared to what your operations plan said May was supposed to look like?
Mike: Yeah, that number is a little bit surprising to me as well, because I can tell you that we probably did not really feel that as much in the business. Look, we build buildings, we call it “building the church for Easter.” We tend to build large buildings that can support a very aggressive and assertive peak.
But when we fill them up, May seems a little bit early. We typically start to see volumes coming in June, July, August. And then we’re talking about Black Friday peak. August, September, the buildings are ready to go. They’re filled [00:05:00] to the max.
Maureen: So right now US and Canada having big conversations about tariffs. I may have to pull things in that won’t be available to me or certainly won’t be economically available. Are you involved in those conversations with customers?
I assume, ’cause supply chain is a big part of that equation.
Mike: We aren’t necessarily involved in the decision-making process when we face something like that where we’re pulling volumes up closer. This activity is more moving than creating something new. I think our customers are looking at what happened last year, and they do have to deliver peak. And the risks in waiting to get volumes in, as we saw with tariff complexities, anything can change overnight. A sneeze here could cr-create a tsunami over in China or wherever we’re importing stuff from. We have to be able to navigate with our customers and react to their needs.
The challenges can be [00:06:00] how tight’s your communication, how tight’s your relationship with the customer. Sometimes our customers, it’s not that they don’t wanna involve us, it’s just that they have a whole company that navigates this themselves, and sometimes we can be the afterthought.
Maureen: I talked to one of your people today in the UK who’s built AI models to forecast some of this a little better, but th- there’s still no forecasting the things like the tariff wars. It is less predictable than any of us would imagine.
Mike: Yeah, and hence the chaos, because again, AI is only as good as the data that you feed into it, and when you have data that can change literally overnight, you become very reactionary. And of course, reaction costs, like you said, it costs money in one way or another, whether it’s the headcount that we bring in and overtime that we have to pay, or getting additional space or storage trailers to take on some volume.
But the quicker we get the right information, the [00:07:00] better, and sometimes it just doesn’t happen that way.
Maureen: So that leads us into the next question. In volatile conditions, the instinct in most enterprises and with most leaders is to pull decisions upward. More approvals, more visibility, more senior leadership sign-off, which can feel like better controls, better compliance, and it costs speed.
So since you’ve moved into the COO role , where have you deliberately pushed decisions down, and what did you have to put in place, so that the person closest to the work can make the call without escalating it to you?
Mike: I think that DHL is a company that prides itself on building agility, and part of that agility is trusting your people to make the right decisions at the right time and empowering them to move. Look, we have 700 sites plus in the US, [00:08:00] over 250 customers, and there’s no cookie cutter method of dealing with any of that.
So if you have a , a very rigid structure of approvals and having to roll every decision uphill, we’re gonna fail, and we’re gonna do it very consistently. And so we build a network where we teach people, or they come equipped with the ability to make these decisions and the ability to be agile. We don’t necessarily feel like we have to pull decisions up en masse.
There’s certain areas, I think, where we are very coordinated in our approach and view on certain things that may need a little more rigor. We’ll talk about that at the board level, whether it’s here in North America or the global operations board that I’m a part of. We can have discussions on what that means.
We’re very report driven. I have so many Power BI reports that can tell me state of the business today. My [00:09:00] VPs and senior directors, every one of them has their pulse on the business, and we make decisions on where we put our attention as an operations excellence team, and we do it based upon facts, and that’s really how we navigate our business overall.
Once in a while we’ll get a rogue operation or a rogue building or a rogue person, but that’s the exception rather than the policy. I don’t feel that we feel the need to pull a lot of decisions upwards. We have got many of the right operators in the right places and I feel it’s very healthy.
With me personally, I’m a bit of a control freak. I like to be very in tune with the business. I like to dig deep into my verticals. I call it operating a mile wide and an inch deep until I have to go an inch wide and a mile deep. I can be very cautious. I’ve seen this with some of the folks that work in my org and in their verticals.
She’ll know who I’m talking about, one of my VPs, actually, we were doing a reorg within her vertical, and they presented their thoughts on what the reorg should look like, and I had a completely [00:10:00] different thought about it. When they asked me what my view was, I was like, “I’m not gonna share that with you.”
Because your view is different than mine, but mine’s not better. Yours is just as good as what mine is, and so go execute your view. And I think that kind of trust and making sure that you push decisions down to that level, I often ask multiple people, what should my opinion be on this?
There are things that I may have to present or read the business into that I don’t have full expertise on, but I wanna know what my opinion should be so I can drive the right view for our business. I’m doing a better job in my career of letting people run their businesses effectively, getting involved when I need to.
But I think DHL overall, that’s really part of our culture. There’s an expectation that you are the expert in your business and you need to run it effectively. Look, we have leaders in place that run checks and balances and make sure that we’re not doing crazy things. But overall, that’s part of our agility , and that’s why we can move as quickly as we do, is that the decision-making is pretty broadly [00:11:00] spread and very mature.
Maureen: Well, and watching you in action with your VPs and senior directors, where everyone shared their perspective on the topics, and after everyone had spoken , then you shared yours. That sharing of yours added a level of sophistication to the conversation because it gave a level of transparency to how you think.
You have a perspective on the business that nobody else in that room who reports to you has. It’s an issue of altitude.
I have more information, and I make meaning differently, and the meaning-making, again, given their seats, they’re making meaning in the way that fits their org. You’re making meaning in the way that fits everyone consolidated.
Mike: That’s right. But I have to be mature enough to know the difference between the two [00:12:00] and not insert myself in a way that’s going to impact their ability to move the business forward. There are times when I am pretty sure I’m right about something, and in five minutes I can be given a perspective that proves that I’m not.
Of course, everyone high-fives when they prove that I’m not right. You have to be mature enough to say, “I do have a view. It’s based upon what I think is an educated approach, but you are in your vertical 100% of the time. I am not.” I manage eight or nine different verticals and, and am in tune with the business, not just here in North America, but across the globe, and so I have a small percentage of time I can spend in any one area.
So I come with educated guesses, but a lot of times they are not necessarily right. But again, this is, and this is why I think that I enjoy DHL so much because that’s not unique to me within DHL. There’s so many of our leaders that are just like that. I believe I fit within this culture so well because it’s a lot of like-minded [00:13:00] people.
We’re very collaborative. We’re very mature in our approaches on partnering on decisions like this and really moving the business forward effectively.
Maureen: You know, it’s interesting sitting in my seat, both advisory and coaching, having done 360 assessments on people across DHL. The profiles are pretty consistent. There is a culture and a leadership style that is imbued in your more successful leaders.
Mike: Yeah, I would agree. I see it amongst my business partners. I was in Australia last week and did a number, I think I did 10 site visits. I was asked: “What’s your impression of what you’ve seen?” My impression is that a lot of our buildings across the globe could sit in any region.
We’re a lot alike. We have a lot of the same core competencies. We bring on the same leaders, the same type of people. It’s really powerful to go anywhere in the globe and just see that we’re so much alike as a [00:14:00] company, and that’s the culture that just what really makes us successful.
I’ve been in meetings recently with our CEO of supply chain overall, and then recently in May, I believe it was, our global CEO, and they’re the same type of people. They’re very brilliant leaders, but they’re also very down to earth, and you can connect with them very easily, and makes you wanna work for people like that.
Maureen: For anyone listening who is either trying to scale a business or run a large scale business, I think there are some things that DHL does that are just better. And the things you’re doing to create consistency, have built in antifragile or resilience because you have to. You have to respond to a broad range of customers who are having all kinds of issues. I’m not saying issues as in they’re bad. But…
Mike: No, look, if our customers could do this themselves, they would.
Maureen: Yeah.
Mike: A customer that has a supply chain [00:15:00] problem that we can help with is powerful. It allows us to bring in our expertise and navigate through that. That’s our favorite people out there. Come to us with a problem, we can solve it.
That’s what makes for a great relationship.
Maureen: So now let’s move to automation as a capacity. The last time we talked, you mentioned a building with around 3,000 robots. DHL now reports that there are more than 8,000 deployed globally, over a billion euros in contract logistics automation across three years, and the automation or digitization in the large majority of its warehouses.
Mike: Our customers are looking at a problem in their supply chain system that needs solving, and that’s not based upon today. That’s based upon the five and 10-year outlook. And look, the current view can change so much that sometimes our solutions fail. Not necessarily due to us or not necessarily due to the customer, but due to the market [00:16:00] conditions. It happens. Our ability to bring on large technologies, whether that’s within automation or whether it’s within robotics or even AI, is based upon a few things.
It’s based upon our expertise. We hire experts within each of these things. I have a whole group that helps to bring on automation implementations. We have what we call an innovation funnel, where when we introduce any kind of robotics program into the funnel, the first thing that we look at is, would that be useful to us?
Could we scale it across, say, 100 sites? Would it create an ROI that’s healthy? Once we decide that it’s a viable opportunity, we move through the funnel very deliberately with a proof of concept out in the site where we’ll take a look at one of those robots or maybe one across five sites or a few sites, and we very deliberately look at how does that robot or that technology act.
Does it produce what it says it’s gonna produce? Once we [00:17:00] get past the proof of concept and decide that this is something that can scale across our operations, then we look at wholesale implementation path of how we’re gonna roll it out, at to what pace and where. And all along the enterprise, we’re looking at the activity of that technology.
Does it financially return what it’s supposed to return? Does it solve a problem, whether it’s a headcount problem, a productivity problem, could be a safety problem, it could be a financial, it could be almost any kind of a problem. Does the partner we’re working with, are they a good partner? Are they easy to work with?
Are they responsive to our needs? Are they responsive to our customer needs? So there’s a lot that goes into rolling out these technologies . There is a need for speed because any more the market changes so much that in six to eight months we could be still messing around with a POC and the market shifts and now all of a sudden the thing that we were looking at, it doesn’t work anymore and we have to go in another direction.
Uh, that recently happened with a [00:18:00] partner where we had committed to a large number of bots that we were partnering with developing over the course of a few years, and it was with a specific need that we needed to solve. And the company through the company that owned them had to make a shift into another form of technology, and it basically has us going back to square one or to take a look at another path that we need to go down.
That happens pretty frequently. You know, especially when you look at humanoids are a big thing, right? Uh, humanoids are super sexy. They look like humans, they act like humans, but they aren’t necessarily the best technology for us to have in a warehouse environment. Look, a human has weaknesses, joints and appendages and things like that, and when you build that into a robot, that can be potentially impactful in a negative way.
So we take a look at that. We decide if we’re gonna go down certain technology paths. I think our partnerships are good in that we can get priority for some of the technologies we have. We’re often the [00:19:00] largest customer of some of our mechanization partners, some of our robotics partners. We often are the largest partner that they have, or up there with the Walmarts and the Amazons.
So there’s lots of levers that are pulled to determine how we’re gonna bring in technology and where and at what degree, and whether it’s even gonna work for our business.
Maureen: This is the first full year of what DHL calls its Strategy 2030 .
So what’s in it that wouldn’t have been if the last two years had gone differently, and what do you leave behind that you now suspect was written for a world that isn’t coming back?
Mike: I will tell you not necessarily what wouldn’t be in it, because I feel very confident that what’s in the pillars of our strategy are the right things. Looking at our AI initiatives and how we’re navigating through AI, we do have digital by default, but that digital by default pillar is really starting to shift and [00:20:00] morph into a whole AI strategy.
I think data centers caught us by surprise a little bit, because really it’s only in the last year that data centers have gotten legs the way that they are now. And I think refinement of our life sciences vertical and our attention and focus on life sciences overall are probably three things that we’re taking another look at and saying, “You probably should have added some rigor around these things within Strategy 2030.”
So Strategy 2030, I, I love the concept of it. I think that we’re very solid in what we put together; as we go through and the business changes, we’re very comfortable adding more pieces to it. Not a lot, because if you work on too many things as a focus area, then you lose focus.
Maureen: That response points out the short-term, long-term focus. We have to have a long-term direction, and we continue to learn based on our operations and [00:21:00] refine.
So let’s jump to the signature question that I ask everyone. In the spirit of innovating leadership and co-creating our future, what’s the one leadership choice you believe senior leaders or boards should make in the next 30 days? And what systems or practices must be in place so that that choice actually sticks?
Mike: I’m gonna answer this probably a lot more simplistically than you would expect, but to me, the biggest thing that we have to do over the course , it’s not just 30 days, but it’s every single day, is stick to the basics. I often equate it to sports teams. Sports teams practice the same play over and over again.
And what’s the last thing they put in place? Trick plays. Trick plays are there, but they’re not at the forefront. It’s not what you work on the most. And so we have to be careful that we keep focusing on the basics. At the end of the day, we are a [00:22:00] company of associates and supervisors. Those are the most important people in our business, and if we’re not impacting their lives positively, making work easier for them, we’ll lose our base.
And how we do that is to execute the basics, making sure that we’re interfacing with people the right way, making sure that we have policies and procedures in place that are healthy for everyone, making sure that our culture is driven the right way. We celebrate people. We respect people. Across the world, if we stick to the basics and we do what we know to do that’s right… look, we’re gonna have complications come in where we have to call an audible. I’ll stick to the sports theme there. Call an audible, but again, practice, practice, practice those things and make sure that we’re calling the right plays all the time. I think it’s no more than that. We know what to do. Let’s make sure we execute it the right way.
Maureen: Well, while you and I get to have esoteric conversations it comes back to it’s only helpful if it turns into actual [00:23:00] behavior and results
Mike: Exactly. We call it respect and results within DHL. That’s the two things that we pride ourselves on is we drive for results, but we do it with respect, too.
It’s a powerful place to be where you come to work every day and know that you like the people that you’re working with, you liked what you’re doing . And I mean this in all sincerity, some of my worst days at DHL were still better than some of my best at other companies.
Living through a poor culture is, it can significantly impact your life, not just professionally, but personally, and knowing that you can come to work and be treated with fairness and respect. Our EOS scores prove it out. We’re in the middle of our EOS cycle right now. We continue to get better in that way every single year.
Our returns just show that we continue to be the company that is respectful, but while driving great results.
Maureen: And it’s a tough balance to hit. That is not an insignificant thing
Mike: Most definitely, especially when the pressures of the business are here. It’s a high-pressure [00:24:00] business, especially if you look at our book of business with some of the biggest companies in the world, they’re under a lot of financial pressure. Those are the ones that feel the impacts of the tariffs and the pricing impacts that come through with some of these policy decisions.
They’re the ones driving sales. We’re on the tail end of that , and it is impactful to us, but the pressures that they go through and us having to navigate with them, again, it’s also a respectful, uh, results-driven policy with the customer as well. We all respect each other. We have a lot of really good customers that we enjoy working with.
Maureen: Yeah, it’s hard to have a respectful internal culture if your external culture is toxic.
Mike: Exactly.
Maureen: What Mike’s described today isn’t really a story about logistics. It’s a story about getting the basics right and practicing and drilling and delivering with a respectful environment, and the learning loops that determine how fast an [00:25:00] enterprise turns a signal into a decision and a decision into movement, is really the more robust underpinning of the story.
At the Innovative Leadership Institute, we talk about decision velocity as one part of what we call the innovative leadership system. The premise that leadership is a system, results follow the design, and it’s relatively predictable. The uncomfortable truth is that most organizations find out what state theirs is in only in a year that it fails them.
And so having a system that will help organizations build agility is really what we have committed ourselves to, because like Mike said, we love working with our clients, and our goal is to help them be even more successful than they already are.
So Mike, thank you for the opportunity to have this [00:26:00] conversation, to share your incredibly important insights, and your philosophies.
So I’d also like to thank our listeners for joining us on Innovating Leadership: Co-creating Our Future. If you are interested in elevating the quality of your leadership, please reach out. Like us, share us, encourage others to listen to the podcast. And Mike, where would people learn more about either what you’re up to or DHL?
Mike: I think there’s a wealth of information about DHL that you can look for online. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Michael McClellan or Mike McClellan.
Especially if you have something you wanna talk about with leadership, reach out to me there and I’d be happy to have conversations.
Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you