Most leaders think they set the priorities, but what actually sets the priority inside an organization is what the leader pays attention to.

Attention determines the priorities.

Giving the why before the what.

Bob McEwen is the executive vice president and chief revenue officer of Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the largest media companies in the world, responsible for billions in brand attention.

He spent decades inside the attention economy, from radio to sports media to some of the most valuable billboards on earth, including Times Square.

Brands aren't buying media, they're buying attention.

And that insight changed how he thinks about leadership.

Because inside an organization, attention doesn't just drive marketing, it drives energy.

Where I place my attention determines the organizational energy.

In this conversation, you'll discover why leaders accidentally create chaos without realizing it.

The communication rule that great leaders borrow from billboards and the leadership habit that determines what every team actually does.

If everything's important, nothing's important.

Let's get those priorities.

It's time to lead the team.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning.

And this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire, and ripple out.

It's not just a podcast.

It's a positive movement to build better leaders.

And you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple.

This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive.

Enjoy.

Bob McKeown, Chief Revenue Officer of Clear Channel Outdoors.

Welcome to lead the team, sir.

Thank you, Ben.

Great to be here.

Bob, you've spent decades in what's basically the attention economy.

Most leaders think they set the priorities

by what they say.

But you've argued something different, that attention

determines the priority inside an organization.

What do you mean by that?

We need to have clarity on what the priorities are to get the attention we need.

I talk a lot about, and I was just with our teams this, this past week in Miami talking about context, leadership, giving the why before the what.

And that is something that I've learned over the years, that the why.

Let me talk about why this is important to the company, to you, your role.

Before I say we have to sell this thing or do this thing or whatever it is.

The why before the what is something that's important.

That's just that context.

And that also gets to the authenticity of leadership.

Like if, if you can explain that to, to someone, they're part of something much bigger.

And I, I've learned that that is really how we get people moving forward.

And I, I really think that that the, the, the priorities are kind of, that come from that.

And look, if everything's important, nothing's important.

Saying, I use that a lot of things.

And I think that, you know, look, we are, we have in our company and previous companies a number of initiatives.

And I always try to boil it down to, okay, let's, let's get those priorities and how do we communicate that?

If I'm on the other end of a meeting, like, play that back for me.

How did I hear that?

And that's always a thing.

So that's a little bit of how I think that, you know, we should be thinking about prioritization.

Attention, where I place my attention determines the organizational energy.

So, Bob, brands spend billions of dollars every year trying to capture just a few mere seconds of attention, AKA the Super Bowl.

Now, you've spent your entire career inside businesses building around just that, from iHeartMedia to Clear Channel Outdoor.

When did it first click for you just how valuable attention really is?

Yeah, no, it's a great way to start, Ben.

Look, I think it was earlier in my career I had a vision of how media was traded.

I got into a national training program in New York City where I was selling radio stations, and it was all numbers based at the largest holding company.

Tremendous experience.

Amazing.

This is Katz Media.

They had a fantastic training program that gave me one side of it is how to compete in sales, how to position ratings, and so forth.

But then I pivoted and I moved to Chicago and I got local experience.

And what I got then was the understanding of how those commercials that I was selling back in New York City actually landed with the brands.

So I worked locally in Chicago, and it was fascinating.

And what I realized quickly is that, you know, brands aren't buying media, they're buying attention.

And when you get farther down to the actual, what I'll call kind of that end user, right, the, the person that's on the, that's responsible for the ad at their people showing up to their dealership.

It was all about attention.

They didn't think about Nielsen rating or the stuff I was hand to hand combating in, in New York.

It was, yeah, that's great about your ratings, but I really care about sales and roi.

So what it got to point was like, how does my brand stand out on your medium?

Right?

And that's what I, I learned pretty quickly at a young age when I was fresh from New York into Chicago, that, you know, they buy attention, not media.

And that was a tremendous learning that kind of helped me in my career.

Yeah, it's so funny too.

I'm thinking about attention.

Think.

I'm thinking about ready.

Think about listeners.

But no, it's different.

Like you can be listening to the radio, but it doesn't mean it has your attention.

That's right.

So it's like multiple levels.

How do you think about that from attention, like listeners versus actual attention.

And what's the value difference there?

Yeah, no, it's.

It is.

It has changed tremendously, right, where.

Where new media is now or social media is versus where traditional media was just back in those days.

It's changed tremendously.

Brands could buy, you know, a TV ad nationally and ensure some version of attention.

Right.

People weren't skipping through it.

Technology has put the crawl control back in the consumers.

And I think that's been a big pivot.

And I think that, you know, as you know, later in my career, in the last 10 years at Clearchill on the outdoor side, I'm fortunate to get into an industry where, you know, Ben, I mean, on average, I think it's like a million people go through the Lincoln Tunnel every day.

Right.

And they're stuck in gridlock traffic and they cannot escape.

They cannot escape even beneath.

Yeah, you can be sitting in your car beneath the Hudson river in the Lincoln Tunnel.

It's so creepy.

Going nowhere and you've got in that traffic that you're stuck to.

You get there, you see.

You know, we have a couple of our displays right there that are captivating that people are probably frustrated at the time by staring out their window and then they get through the tunnel.

They may see a bus here and there, you know, but that media in real life, right.

That human experience is so powerful and that is a pretty big pivot and that does command attention.

That is something where I think the out of home industry has a tremendous advantage over some of the other kind of call it traditional media options.

So it's a, it's exciting thinking about

that time when you went from New York, Chicago and had that realization.

What really I'm trying to like, what was there a moment beyond that even where you really committed to this industry?

Because I mean, it's, it's been a industry that has changed so dramatically over the years, even over the last year.

And why not like get out of this business all together?

Because, like, man, this is too much change.

It's too crazy.

It's.

It's nutty.

And you just doubled down and kept rising through the ranks.

Yeah.

Despite all the, all the, all the changes.

What is it about it?

Or was There a moment that really hooked you.

Yeah.

So, you know, look, I, I think for me, you know, one of the, the pivot to Chicago, then ultimately know to Boston, back to York and you know, was I saw how local media at that time I was on the radio side, you know, really could deliver results for, for clients.

And, and what I loved working with was working with my teams, leading them through, in essence, solutions, solution based selling, you know, thinking about, you know, not about what we need to sell, but what they need to move on their end.

And to me, that was a passion.

It still is.

And, and you know, when I talk to my teams today, I talk about how we begin a conversation with a needs assessment and it is really about the customer, it's not about us.

And I think at that time the reason I stayed in it is, you know, local radio at that time and then sports sponsorships on the radio as I move forward really allowed us to have that connection.

We had, we had a number of, we were in Chicago.

It's great.

I was thinking about this just this morning.

You know, a number of the big programs we did that we could break through with marketers had little, little ratings behind it, so it didn't show up on that ranker.

But it connected, had resonance, it had impact.

And we did work with Mike Ditka you did work with at the time, it was Walter Payton and Gail Sayers icons that we would build sponsorship packages around that were driven by radio.

And it would work, it would be really effective.

So I could see the results, I guess, to answer your question.

And that's what kept fueling me.

And that, that got me to my team in Boston where I ran, you know, along with my partner, both, you know, the largest sports radio station and sponsorship team with the Red Sox.

And it was the same thing.

It was that passion that I had for the results in the creativity I could use and the bringing the marketing solutions to bear that wasn't as easy on the national side.

Do you have an example that you could share with us or like a case study that you worked on where, hey, this thing didn't show up in the Nielsen ratings.

But you know what, it ain't all about the ratings.

It's about the results.

And check this out, like I said, like where that really set out for you?

Yeah, so we had a number of programs in Boston that come to mind as we think about it back in this, this is kind of mid 2000s, early early 2000s in Boston.

And we were working as the flagship radio station for the Boston Red Sox network, and we would build programs.

Wow.

So great.

Yeah, it was really cool to integrate now.

Now, here's what's even cooler too, Ben.

And for me, I'm from Boston, so for me, this is like, you know, guy moves to New York, Chicago, I'm coming home.

And, like, I can get paid to listen to the Red Sox and think about how more people can listen to the Red Sox with me.

It is so true.

So one of the first things you get when I moved there, Ben from Chicago, as fortunate to have the role I went, they said, we need to get your ID for the building, which is common.

Fill out your forms, and then you have to go down to Family park and get your ID to get the stadium.

And growing up in Boston, you know, as my dad was alive then, and he was, he was like, this is the greatest.

My son has made it.

He has a past at Fenway Park.

But.

But.

But I saw the power of that brand.

And we would talk about fan loyalty as brand loyalty, right?

That was like a big buzzword, we would say.

And we had a number of programs that we would build that would build on the equity that the fans had with that broadcast.

We used our broadcasters.

We did a number of programs with heart, local hardware stores that would call out features within the games and then drive back to redemption in support of our radio.

And it was powerful.

And again, they kept renewing, and it worked.

So that was a good experience.

I mean, what I loved about that was the ability that my team had to be very creative in the programs we built.

And that was something that I definitely thrived on.

So it was like you were building, like, fortifying the whole Red Sox ecosystem with the local merchants that maybe they don't get.

They don't get a lot of press, right.

Or they don't really have a direct channel for marketing.

But it sounds like locally there you did have a way to do that.

You were able to get creative with your team and think through that and make it beneficial.

And the other thing on it, too, Ben, was, you know, radio at that time was very efficient, right?

It was very affordable.

It was reachable for a lot of clients.

Whereas the production costs, if you wanted to in game, Red Sox or Yankees, wherever your pick, favorite team was very expensive.

Bariatric is pretty high.

We could produce a spot and then we could activate it because we had assets in the stadium.

And one of the coolest things that myself and one of my former colleagues, Jim Rushton, he's the chief revenue officer for the Commander Style.

He Went out to.

Did some really great jobs in the NFL.

Cool.

You know, we would, we would go and we would.

We would send the play by play spring training, like right now, we'd send a spring training.

A list of our spring training prospects that were just on that bubble.

We had to close and we knew we had to close them before spring training ended.

We send it to the play by play host as Joe Castiglion.

Hall of Famer Joe Castiglion.

We get it.

And we would say, joe, just call these folks after hours.

Back in the voicemail.

Leave a message on the business owner's voicemail.

Tell them how excited you are to.

You could be calling their name.

And I'll tell you, Ben, it was magic.

That was like our close because they knew his voice.

They knew his.

They're playing for people in the office, Ben, and they're like, oh, you know, you had to hear this Ben joke.

Stiglione, call me.

So that was fun and that was such a great experience.

And just, just as we move off of that, you know what I learned beyond the creativity and the power of the brand and was how important we built something band.

I mentioned my friend Jim.

We mentioned the team that we built there and we hired them, a lot of them from the ground up.

Five or six of them have gone on to be executives in the NFL.

You know, we've got CMOs, we've got people who are C executives, and they all started buying into that vision we had.

It was a shared vision.

You know, this is a special moment.

Let's capitalize, work hard, let's have fun.

And it was amazing.

And again, these are all people that started their career on this team.

And I'm really proud of that legacy that I was part of that with my partners that we have around the world.

And we just keep in touch.

So it's very cool.

I pivoted from that into the leadership legacy piece because I think that's really super cool.

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What are the lessons from the billboard world of Times Square that Leaders can apply to their own leadership, communication style, attention, you know, you've seen it from so many different directions.

Yeah.

So I think what are some cross pollination ways to, to take away from that?

Yeah, I think the, the first thing I would say is and I'm going to take a step back just for a quick sec on an out of home creative.

It's six or seven words is kind of what we say.

It's a clear, concise message you put on a billboard and then you can take that down where the product is the hero.

You don't want someone driving by saying well I don't know what that was.

I need to understand was an interesting message.

But what was that?

It got my attention, but I don't understand it.

Exactly.

And I think if you think about designing for a roadside, you know, environment of billboard, you're in Dallas, you're driving around.

That is the kind of common practice of seven words or less.

And then I think the key on this is how do you take.

Because people are on journeys.

If I'm in New Jersey and I'm driving in and I work where I work in New York, I go through Times Square, I pass billboards along the way.

I get there.

It's almost like this multi touch amplifier.

I need to see some resemblance of the creative I just saw Coca Cola does a creative for a holiday campaign.

It should look similar in Times Square.

The execution can be different because you've got video but it should look similar.

You say oh yeah, that's right, I saw that along the way.

Because frequency and out of home is incredibly powerful.

But I would say that, you know, don't think like you take a social, don't take your Instagram video.

Right.

And just immediately think that fits on a, on a large scale massive.

What doesn't?

You know, spend the money, spend the time, think about the environment.

You know, using QR codes in that environment because they're pedestrian, you can do that legally versus obviously driving a car is powerful but what are they going to.

Right.

What is the redemption on it?

I do think in Times Square one of the innovations has been this 3D anamorphic which you can make a billboard look like it's 3D without glasses or anything.

It's.

It's powerful.

So I think again designing for the, for the environment I think is critical.

Thinking about the video.

Don't just repeat purpose video and up there and making sure it looks like the same campaign.

Some of the things I would say

thinking about your career, Bob, what's the biggest leadership Lesson your career has taught you

well.

I think, I think, you know, when you get hosted earlier today, we're thinking about my early days in Chicago.

You know, I think that the, the first thing I, you need to remember is, you know, you are the, you're the leader, right?

You are, you're, you need to create bias.

There's two things I'd say.

One is, one is you need to hire great people and give them room to move, be, be successful.

I mentioned my time in Boston.

I think the, you know, the, the, the first thing I would say is that you, you, you then when you start, that's really hard because I want to be involved in everything.

Right.

And I think that's where the people come in.

My greatest lever was hiring great people.

Has always been giving them the rules, the guardrails and move forward.

I think when I started out, the lesson is, you know, not everybody works like me.

Right?

That's it.

And, and I think that's fine.

Get so simple, but it's easy to forget.

That's the way I do things.

Why aren't you doing his way?

No, I'm different.

Exactly.

And I think that, you know, for me the key was learning.

That was a little hard because I, early on I jumped into every decision and I didn't trust my people.

I undermined my people.

And that was something that I evolved over the years to say, hey, look, trust yourself, trust your people.

And then, you know, and then you'll, you'll, you'll succeed.

And I do think, I think that the, you know, people want to know that you're in it with them.

And I think that you get out of your office, show them that you understand, get to know them.

I mentioned I was in, I was in Miami last week.

What a market visit.

Meeting with our teams, myself, my CEO.

And the first thing we did, we did two things.

First thing is we met with our team.

We did an all hands meeting.

Everybody from installers to sellers to marketing people.

We talked about their business, we heard from them, we listened.

And then we went out and saw customers with the CEO of our company.

And it was great.

Everybody from agencies to attorneys to local customers.

And for me, if I don't put myself in front of customers and I don't really sit in front of my team and understand what they're up against, I'm not going to be successful.

And early on, that was a lesson I, I learned.

Early on I was behind a spreadsheet and I was doing my stuff and I was maybe barking a command or Two out.

And I think I've grown on that.

So you mentioned hiring great people.

How important that's been for you?

What questions or processes or things do you look for to make sure that you're getting the great hires?

Yeah, yeah, look, I think that's, that is the, the big question.

So it was a couple things we do.

So we have assessments, we, to identify underlying talents.

Right.

As a company.

And that's, that's there, that's helpful.

That's, you know, think about it like a strength finder.

So we use that.

But I think the dialogue for me is always critical.

How do you work?

Tell, like very simple question, Ben, about, you know, tell me about your, you know, someone new to the business.

Tell me about your, your pursuit of this job.

You know, tell me more about how you work, how you think.

I'm sure they went to a terrific school.

That's great.

I got that.

But, but some of the best people I've hired, most successful people are people who had to scratch and claw and hustle and they applied that to the work.

So, so getting a little more narrative about them, the person and how they work always pays off for me.

And I think that's kind of moved forward.

It's the stuff you can't get on a, on a resume and world of AI and filters and having all these, you know, third party hiring companies.

It's a real risk for leaders, especially when you're hiring at scale like you guys are.

It's like, man, it's so easy to just, you know, just hope that they're the right person and make it sounds like you're making the time to really get to know them and dive into their background as a human.

Agreed.

And I think the, you know, as I, as I elevate up in my career as a CRO, I have teams that do that.

So, you know, how can I help teach them some of these things?

I learned that's the key because I'm not going to be able to meet with all the people they hire.

But I say, you know, the, the biggest thing, you know, on the hiring is, you know, you, you get it right.

We know the answer.

That's great.

You get it wrong.

On a team environment that can be really dysfunctional and you know, whether it's the, you know, good to great, which I think is a terrific book.

Right.

First who, then what.

I believe in that and I really believe, you know, I've had leaders say to me, hey, this is, this is what we're going to do.

And I'm So, okay, let's talk about your team first, and let's go to the first two then.

The what?

And again, they get the people in the right seats and off the bus because getting them off the bus is.

Is not easy.

And you need to be, you know, you need to be thoughtful, you need to be, you know, as careful as you can.

But if they're not in the right seat, if not doing the right role, then you're never going to be successful.

So making sure we get that right is.

It's one of the big things that I work with our teams on right now is the team dynamic and identifying that talent and then putting them in the right seats and giving them that room to root and getting our managers out of the way.

You know, that's the big thing.

What part of leadership has been the hardest for you personally?

So I think that.

I think it is certainly over the last 10 years or so, it's the impact of some of the decisions that we make that I have to make.

And I think it's, you know, the right decisions for the company that I'm tasked with doing have personal implications.

And I think understanding that and, you know, I, I do my best to treat everybody fairly.

I think that context and the consistency and the clarity is important, but that's been hard.

We've had some tough decisions that, that have.

We've had to make as a company that I've had to make.

And that's been.

That always is tough because people are at the core of our business.

So how do you approach the.

When you're making.

Like, it could be restructuring, it could be layoffs, it could be even promoting people in areas where they're going to struggle or.

But you got to have them or you're hiring external.

There's so many ways you could do it.

I love how much detail you could give us, but, you know, whatever that is and then how you personally go about making those decisions, because every single leader is going to have those.

Yeah, I, It's.

It's really hard.

You know, I've been part of the great financial crisis, for example.

We made a pretty dramatic change.

This is when I was on the radio side, and we had to scale back our sales team by like 30%, our leadership by 30%.

And that happened in a, In a, a, A pretty quick turn.

And, you know, I, I think where we originally approached it, it was very personal.

I had our leaders together and we started looking at the performance and hey, and, and, you know, I, I got back to, we have to run this business.

Right.

So let's try our best to not make it personal.

Like, let's, let's.

Personal is going to come into this because they're, they're people we have relationships with.

But let's think about the business and then let's talk about the people.

And I think the more you communicate, the more context you provide our teams, even in that moment, which is really, really hard, we did provide as much of the why versus just the why.

People that were impacted, we tried to do our best to do that.

I think that was very, very hard.

But I do think it's, it's going through.

You know, certainly data will help you make these decisions.

But thinking about coverage, thinking about fit, thinking about people who do the role, and then not just today, because one of the things that I think a lot about is everybody can run a checklist.

I need to do this.

What we have to do is think about, especially in out of home and in advertising, where's this business going to be in, in two years, three years, five years?

And am I staffing my team and building a team to get to that?

I'm meeting my customers where they are.

So the part that you push on is, and I remember these moments now you're bringing this back to me.

We thought about the business today.

It was a great financial crisis.

And I said, guys, this world's going to look very different coming out of this.

So we have to push ourselves to say how do we build a team to be successful in that environment?

And knowing that we're going to have to make these tough decisions, we're down and that took a while, but we got there.

And I think that's, that's a big part of it is not just thinking about the job today and the role we have, but where does this company need to go?

And, and that's, that's what I try to land.

I want to go through those.

Yeah, it's so important to think about in those moments.

I can see it's like, hey, we got to make the decisions right now for the business to keep this thing going based on the reality we face.

But it sounds like one of your anchors is the vision for how the company's going to be.

Because if you trim back people or technology or investment so much for what could be a short term challenge, you're not going to be prepared to go the distance when things go back, come back because you won't have the infrastructure, be able to do it.

That's right.

You look at right now, Ben, what's going on in our, in the advertising ecosystem.

So if you've got a pick the number a third of consumers using an ad blocker, right.

You know, or more 50% of digital ads or bots.

Now you talk about AI where most marketers have been focused on using, you know, search as their kind of lower funnel KPI they buy now that 66% of all searches are coming back with zero results because of AI.

I need my team thinking differently about the opportunity for out of home that is not impacted by any of that.

But we have an opportunity to build brands.

So I'm literally in the middle of this with my team retraining the team.

Say, hey, here's how you have that conversation.

Don't say out of home is going to fix that.

Say, hey, I understand you're going through that.

What if we could build your brand recognition so much you didn't have to rely on this because it'll be something with AI will come back and the smart people over there will figure out, monetize it.

But right now it's pretty disruptive.

And I have to think about two, three years down the road.

What are my teams talking about?

What tools do I need, what resources do I need?

So that's the visioning thing.

And, and I think as a leader, that is the mentality you need.

I, I think about it like I used to.

I talk a lot with my teams about go to the balcony, right, to look down on our business.

I tell them all the time to break tired if they hear go to

the balcony, go to the balcony.

So like in, in we're in the business, not working on the business.

I'm like, hey, let's go to the balcony.

Let's look down on this problem.

Let's think about this.

And then we'll get back down from the balcony and we'll, we'll do the pieces together.

I like that.

It's like imagine yourselves in that position to shift out of your mindset.

In fact, I've heard it reminds me is like some leaders will say, hey, we're not having our staff meeting here today.

We're going to a different place to have it.

Right.

That's right.

You know, just, just to move.

Sometimes you got to physically remove yourself from the situation.

Mentally you can't get there.

Always you're thinking the same thoughts, the same routine, the same meeting in the same place.

And shifting to the balcony or the literal balcony can help you think about the problem differently.

And it's amazing we don't have a ton of Time left.

But your, your industry is so interesting because with the world so digital in so many ways and businesses focus so much on buying ads on for phones and social media, the physical world is probably overlooked more than it should be.

And I think there may be an acknowledgement now that the way and it sounds like you're there too.

Like our business is about.

People are about to start emphasizing the physical world, advertising a lot more because we're so inundated digitally.

How do you see yourself as a leader in this space?

And if you're going to read the tea leaves, how are these going to look from the balcony a few years from now?

Yeah, I think what's going to happen and I see this from the conversations I have with our marketers, the national marketers.

There's a tremendous lean into out of home.

But what comes from that, if they're shifting, for lack of a better term, some digital dollars to out of home.

What we have been working on and what we have now and the industry is evolving is there needs to be measurement capability.

So you know we're always going to be one to many.

And I think what's happening with the marketers is they're talking about I'll give you real life.

We're talking about the personalization, right?

So we talk about personalization at scale.

How do I think about a billboard is going to reach X number of people But I can understand through my data capabilities the audiences that were exposed to that billboard and where they went after exposure.

So I can get a little closer to something that is akin to attribution on the digital side and that is a real big evolution.

So I see us evolving towards, towards that one of the.

Just because you maybe think about this here real life example sweded a campaign.

One of the big growth verticals for us is pharmaceutical and it's all that money that is spent on television and CTV and digital is I think kind of up for grabs right now for a number of reasons.

So we've, we've worked on data solutions to understand how to tie out a home exposure to script lift.

It's powerful.

It's amazing.

It's been growing.

Did a campaign for one of the large, I'll say one of the large pharmaceutical brands.

And the at the recap meeting she shared with us, the head of Markby shared with us her boss got up and was talking about the campaign and said I didn't know we bought billboards and it was not in a positive way.

It was okay.

I didn't know that was part of our strategy because we were buying ctv.

And what she said was, to the entire room, she goes, we did, and here's why we did it.

And here's the role that billboards play in driving all this other stuff.

And by the way, what was the last mobile ad you remember seeing for our brand?

And the room went by like, because you don't remember them.

So it was.

Yet you all remember that.

Because they all chimed in, they said, I saw that ad, I saw one over there.

Yeah.

I said, so you're all, you're seeing that, right?

Creating that impact.

But yet when asked the question about, tell me about a mobile ad, tell me about a digital ad you saw, they couldn't even say they saw one, they've seen one.

So to me, it's, it's, it's versus

attention versus actual understanding and remembering.

Just remembering the ad or the billboard is the goal.

Right?

That's the treasure.

It's the message.

Yeah, no, it's true.

It was a real life that happened a few weeks.

It was fun.

What do young leaders often misunderstand about leadership?

Look, I think the first thing is, and I learned this in Chicago, right, I think that leadership is a responsibility, not an authority.

It's kind of what I would say is simple and that is, is a responsibility, it's not an authority.

And I think that you come into that role and you think you have that and then people won't follow you.

Right?

People aren't going to follow you.

And you have to show empathy, but you have to have strong, consistent leadership.

And I think the consistency.

We talked about this earlier around how you show up to your team.

Look, I am as fiery as anybody can be.

I'm competitive, I want to win for sure.

But when they bring problems to me, my composure, I have to remember that.

And I think the leadership, make sure you keep your emotion in check and remember you have a responsibility, not this ultimate authority over them.

And I think that you'll be successful.

Yeah, I really like ending on that note.

It's just a great reminder that yes, with a title, you do sort of get some authority with that.

But if you're, if you're really focused on leading by wielding that authority, you forget the responsibility to them that you have to the organization and to yourself.

And if we can just approach our work days from that, hey, this is my responsibility.

This is my opportunity.

Not just to go in and, you know, shoot from the hip, wing it as the leader, you're going to get a lot different outcome and a huge congratulations, Bob.

On what a cool career.

And everyone's got to keep their eyes on Bob because, man, so many big things coming in your space, man.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Thanks, Bob.

Thank you, Ben.

Pleasure.

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