The Primitive Podcast
The Primitive Podcast: Dr. Ken Jones
Posted by Kade Wilcox | October 19, 2020
Leadership in life is so interconnected that if you learn to lead better, you naturally learn how to live better.
In this episode, the former president and chancellor of Lubbock Christian University, Dr. Ken Jones, breaks down three critical aspects of effective leadership: sound personal character, how you view and treat people, and your perception of the future.
Hear more from Dr. Jones in this episode of The Primitive Podcast.
Kade Wilcox (00:00):
Hey guys. Kade Wilcox here, host of The Primitive Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Ken Jones. He was the president and chancellor of Lubbock Christian University for almost 20 years. One of the things you'll learn about Dr. Jones is that he has been a student of leadership for a long time. And as you listen to him, you'll hear that come through. It was a real pleasure. One of the most profound statements I've ever heard on our podcast, Dr. Jones shared. So I can't wait for you to hear it and enjoy this episode as much as I do.
Mr. Jones thank you so much for joining the podcast. I really appreciate it. We were talking before we started recording, about your connection to my little sister who played basketball at Lubbock Christian, while you were the president and the chancellor there. I'm really pleased that you take the time to connect with us. For those who don't know who Ken Jones is, could you tell us a little bit about your background, your time at LCU.
Ken Jones (01:17):
Well, I grew up on a farming ranching operation in Western Oklahoma, and my wife and I a year ago moved back there. I'm still involved in a lot of leadership speaking and consulting. Primarily coaching, I would say, but I'm an engineer by training. I got a degree from Oklahoma State University. A PhD in engineering, and somehow by a series of steps, I think providential steps, I ended up as President of Lubbock Christian University. I stayed president there for 19 years and was chancellor for five and it was just a wonderful time of life. And now Susan and I have moved back to Western Oklahoma, and our son operates a ranch and another business on the side of that. And we are readjusting to a small town life. It was culture shock, but it worked well. But our time in Lubbock we literally spent most of our life here, and it was just wonderful.
That's great. So tell us a little bit about how you became President. So you have an engineering degree, how'd you get connected to Lubbock. At what point did things start aligning for you to become the President of a school? That sounds like an interesting path.
I was a faculty member at Oklahoma State University for a while. Five years in fact. I was back at the campus of Oklahoma state this week. But I was speaking a lot in different arenas and speaking a lot through the university and speaking a lot in a local congregation, a church and people kept trying to talk me into becoming a full time pulpit speaker. It really wasn't a fit for me. I mean, it went well, but in the process of doing that, I was invited to come to Lubbock to a church that you know, probably had 1,400 to 1,600 people on Sunday morning and that went well. But I think a Lubbock Christian found out that I had a background in engineering and I had a specific background in my master's degree work and some civil engineering work.
And at that time, Lubbock Christian University owned the nation's largest land application of waste facilities. So we had a 17 mile pipeline that was originally from a grant from the EPA all the way from Lubbock down to Wilson. And we irrigated 4,000 acres of land that we owned. Well, they were in some trouble, and it was the trustees that said, you really have an engineering degree and you really know something about land application waste. You really know about municipal wastewater. And I knew about that much. I'm holding my fingers saying about that much, a tiny bit. And it was like they didn't care about anything else. They just said you're going to become our President. So I was the least qualified president Lubbock Christian ever had.
That's great. Wow. I had no idea that was the case. I had no idea that existed. That's crazy. And what an interesting way for you to get your foot in the door of a university. You have an interesting perspective on leadership. And so before you answer things, feel free to both answer from your own personal experience as being a leader, but then you have this really cool experience of being able to be around a lot of great leaders. And so feel free to answer from either of those perspectives. But when you think of your role as a leader or the role of a leader of an organization, what things come to your mind and what have you experienced as being critical and what have you seen as being critical for a leader?
Leadership has been a passion of mine since I was about 28 years old. I started listening to material on leadership. I started reading material on leadership. I saw Lubbock Christian University as an opportunity to expand those leadership skills. And throughout my time at Lubbock Christian, knowing that I had a place to practice leadership, but I was invited to go out and speak on it really frequently. And so what I learned was that leadership and life are really interconnected. And if I could learn to lead better, I could learn to live better. And if I could help people to learn some leadership, they would learn more how to live life better. And so I have a passion for people using this bit of time we have on earth to live it to the fullest. To have purpose in it, have meaning in it, have hope in it, have direction in it. And I believe leadership does all of that. And I teach about it regularly.
That's really good. What are some of the characteristic traits that you've seen as really central to effective leaders that you've been able to coach or be around or observe?
I think I could say it's about three things. Leadership is about who you are. And so you're never going to rise any higher in this life than your own personal character. You're never going to rise any higher in this life than the amount of energy and investment you make in your own personal growth. So people who dig into who they are and want to become better in character and want to become better in personal growth, they end up being the ones that lead well. So I think a leader has to pay a lot of attention to who they are. I think, secondly, just to simplify it down, leadership is about people. And nothing works without people. And how you treat people and what you believe about people is central to leadership.
And so I believe that people are different and so one size doesn't necessarily fit all, but I believe in critical areas of life, people are the same. You peel back the layers of our life and down inside, we look about the same or respond about the same. And I think leaders have to believe that people are really smart. We're smart in different ways, different subjects, but people are really smart. They're really talented. I think that every person has a story. And if you can learn that story about people, you learn amazing things about people. I think that every person on the face of this earth needs and responds to a lot of encouragement. And so as a leader, when I view people like this, as how important they are, how smart they are, and how I can't get anything done without people really getting on board, I think that then I give them encouragement and recognition.
It's just amazing. I saw at Lubbock Christian what I would consider, myself included, a bunch of ordinary people that came together and became a team and became cohesive. And things happened that we never dreamed could happen. So leadership is about who you are. It's about how you view and especially how you treat people and leadership is about how you look to the future. I love to dream. I love to look to the future because one of the interesting things that I believe about people is that we are the only thing that exists upon this earth that can look at tomorrow and see it differently than it is today. And take steps to make that difference come true. My dog can't do that. My horse can't do that. Nothing else can do that but you have that gift. And I have that gift to be able to see tomorrow and ask the question, what do you want it to look like? What I want life to look like? And if I can figure out what I want it to look like, and I know where I am today, it doesn't take anyone really brilliant to figure out some steps to make that dream come true. And I'm big on using the ability to look to the future.
That gets me super excited. I love thinking about the future as well. So it's really powerful and I'm fascinated that you included that. There's really good points there. Can we talk about the application of a few of these things? I love that statement and I'm going to paraphrase cause I may get it wrong in terms of your exact words. I was trying to write and listen as fast as possible, but you said you're never going to rise higher than your investment in your own growth or something to that effect.
It's true.
Talk about the application of your personal development and what that looked like for you. You're responsible for a lot of initiatives and fundraising and stakeholders and department heads, and you had all these stakeholders, so what did it look like for you to prioritize your growth? And what does that look like for you now as you've grown in your leadership,
I told you earlier, I started thinking about leadership and looking at it and reading about it very early. And back in those days, it was cassette tapes. I would listen to them and there was one man I listened to that I loved. He was just a great speaker. And he used to say this. He said, you need to work harder on yourself than you work on your job. Well, I pondered that for years and I thought about that for years. What does Jim Rohn mean when he says work harder on yourself than you work on your job. And I finally began to understand that people have a tendency in life to become stagnant. We have a tendency in life just to get to a certain place and accept it. And that's, that's all there is, that's as far as we're going to go.
And I promise you that does not work well for anybody. Age is not a limiting factor. Education is not a limiting factor for anyone. We try to put limits on things, but there are no limits on these human beings that we are. And so I believe that you invest in yourself. You invest in yourself through reading lots and lots of books. And I read a lot of books on leadership. You invest in yourself by taking educational opportunities. That may be a podcast. Right now we have a world full of information that's coming from every different direction. If I look on my phone right here, I can hit the podcast area and I got all these different brilliant people telling me something new about leadership and you can be really good. But as the old Jim Collins book says, Good to Great, you can't leap to this position of greatness unless you invest in yourself. And by that you are learning to build your character, build your awareness of who you are in humility. Those are the things that allow you to move on into the future and handle larger things, so large at times you don't think it's possible for you to do it.
Yeah. I have so many questions rolling around in my head. I'm frozen between which one to ask first. It's really good. I'm going to have to start just taking notes from the transcripts and instead of trying to keep them on my own here. Same question in terms of application about vision, about the future and about preparing for the future. What have you done historically, or what do you do practically speaking to ensure that you're not so focused on all the doing of leadership and you actually spend time crafting the future and thinking about the future. What does that look like for you on your own journey?
I've spent a lifetime of not only trying to build myself, but trying to say, what do I want the future to look like or talking with my wife and saying, Susan, what do we want tomorrow to look like, if you close your eyes and open them again, and it's three years from now, or four years now, what do you want life to look like? What do you want our relationship to look like? What do you want our family to look like? Where do you want to live? Just tell me what you want life to look like.
I'm doing that with our son right now. He's a grown person, probably your age. And one of the questions I asked him last week is I said, this is about not making decisions related to this ranch or not making decisions related to your pipeline construction business. This is about making the right decision about what you want life to look like.
This is an example of personal growth and leadership. In 2012, I left the presidency of Lubbock Christian University, 19 years. One of the greatest experiences ever. I happened to be up in Washington, D.C. talking to a faculty member at Georgetown University. Brilliant man. You gotta be brilliant to be on faculty at Georgetown. But I'd met him all the way back at Oklahoma State. We were young faculty members together at Oklahoma State. So I get up there and he says, Hey, Jones, you need to go over here to our leadership coaching program. It's not a diploma program, it's a certificate program. So first thing I know I'm enrolled in this thing. I'm going to Georgetown once a month. And I'm going through this executive coaching program. It was a great learning experience for me, but I learned how to work one on one with people who are now leaders, whether they be presidents, CEOs, or emerging leaders or whatever.
And I used to like to ask this question. In fact, I still ask this question, what do you really want? What do you really want? Show me the picture of what you really want? Because if we know where you are and we know what you want, we can design steps to get you there. So it's been so long that I've been doing that. It's just a part of my leadership DNA. That's just where I go. I can't help but to think about the future and what I've learned at this age, I don't turn that off. I still think about that.
Yeah. Which has to be energizing.
Ah you've touched on a key point. Energy comes from vision. A mission is why you exist. It's bedrock. It's why I'm here. It's my purpose. But vision is where I want to go next year or two years, we used to say five years, but things are changing so quickly. We can't do that. But it does supply energy. And if I could show you a little vision curve, I would show you that so many times in my marriage, so many times at the University, and so many times in every organization, you fall into this, what I call the right hand side of the curve, and you become nostalgic, if we could go back to where you used to be, or you begin to question or you get polarized. You begin to drop out. You can't get off that curve unless you have a picture of the future where you believe that tomorrow is better than today. And you can take steps. That's energy. That fills me with passion and energy and it makes life wonderful.
Yes, I concur completely. I could talk the entire time about vision. It's all really encouraging stuff. What about failure? When you think about your career and you think about not only your own experience with failure, but observing failure within leaders, is there anything that strikes you as really critical in terms of how you learn from it?
Well, I don't care who you are, whether you're in a big leadership position, a small leadership position or no leadership position at all, failure is a part of life and failure is a part of doing. And that failure comes in all shapes and forms and failure is always difficult. And failure has the possibility of causing me to begin to doubt that I have the ability to move forward. And failure has the possibility to paralyze me and failure has opportunity to discourage me so that I'm so disheartened and I can't move. Failure's an ugly thing, but it's a reality. It happens. And so what you have to do with setbacks and failures is you have to recognize that they happen. You have to deal with reality and you have to keep moving forward. I've had so many failures and so many mess ups and so many mistakes.
In fact, I just left a meeting at Lubbock Christian. They're about to inaugurate a new president. It's going to be a wonderful thing, but I was asked the question: what is your biggest regret? And I thought, wow, I got so many, but here's the big one for today. All I can tell you is that every person I know, I teach it to my four grandchildren right now, all you can do is hold your head up. Admit if you've made a mistake and go forward.
Lean into that failure.
That's a great term. Lean into it.
That's good. You've spoken about your son. You've spoken about your wife. Now, you mentioned your grandchildren. How throughout the years, have you managed aspiration, leadership responsibility, crafting the future, with the reality of being a good husband, a good father, and now a good granddad. How have you tried to balance it?
Wow. That's a tough one and I've not done well in a lot of things, but we have two children. We have a daughter who lives here in Lubbock, and we have two granddaughters that live here in Lubbock. One's off to college right now, university. And we have two grandsons who live out in the ranch world.
I believe that leadership at its heart, the very best definition of leadership ever written on the face of the earth is this. This is the best. Leaders work for their good and speak for their welfare. Whoever's in your word "their", leaders work for their good and speak for their welfare, and it's more than my own. And so when you boil it down to my family, when I'm gone, I don't care if anybody talks about me as the President of some university or some accomplishment I've done, or some speech that I might have given that was decent. What I really want is for my wife to be able to say he was always working for my good and speaking for my welfare. And I want my children to be able to say that. And I want these grandchildren to say pop was always working for our good and speaking for our welfare, to do that takes a lot of the magic word is balance. And I'm not always balanced well, because you get in a high pressure leadership position and you're running an organization, whatever it is. And it's stress and you're running 60 and 70 hours a week and sometimes seven days a week. And sometimes you neglect those you love the most, or you neglect your own personal growth.
And sometimes it's a wake up call that stops that. Or sometimes you have to stop. I made it a practice, it wasn't something that originated with me, it was an older gentleman in an advisory group meeting. One day, he said to me, young man, had to be a long time ago, my hair was a different color, how much time do you spend thinking? And I thought, what kind of question is that? Why are you going to ask me a question like that in front of all this big audience? And I don't know how I answered the question, but he followed up and said, this organization is too important, and it's too big for you not to spend time thinking. For you to pause because it's dependent on you thinking about the future. So I started making it a practice.
Now there are some things that would get in the way, but you try not to let those things get away. I closed my door early in the morning from 8:00 to 9:00 or 7:30 to 8:30, and I would close the door and I would not be doing a job. I would be thinking about where we're going. Now you have to use that intentionality with your family, with your children, with your grandchildren, or with anything else that's important in life, because we have an easy way to let business crowd out the important things. And it's a danger for leadership and it causes a lot of failures in peripheral things around leadership. But if those things fail around your leadership, they usually touch your leadership in a negative way.
That's really good. What have been some of the biggest personal influences in your leadership journey? I mean, it sounds like you love to read. You mentioned Jim Rohn earlier.
Jim Rohn has been dead for probably a decade now. I still have some of his materials.
He wrote a tremendous amount about Leadership right?
Yeah. He was speaking about it all the time. And so Rohn was an early creator of this appetite within me to grow like that. And some of his phrases still resonate with me. Then I became a student of people like John Maxwell and I'd been through the Cubby stuff and I've gone through the Disney Institute of Leadership and I've forgotten I've been through so many. I went through a Dr. John Townson leadership coaching program. Ken Blanchard out in San Diego, I went there and developed a good friend and was a trainer for him and spent time with Kim Blanchard and just different people I've listened to and watched. And all those people helped me. Then there have been good books like that Good to Great book and his sequel to that, How the Mighty Fall and It's your ship by a man named Abrashoff.
You're so well read. And you clearly have spent a great deal of your vocation thinking about leadership, are there common threads that you've observed or that you've really hung your hat on so to speak when it relates to some of the things you've learned through all these really great thinkers and leaders?
You know, some of the leadership books out there, like everything else, I read a chapter two and say, no, this is not for me it doesn't work. And then some of them, I just sit there and say, this is so simplistic, so straight forward, I love it. This might surprise you. I started a long, long time ago, looking at the Bible as a leadership book. It's a book for many other things. But I started looking at a leadership book, some of my core leadership principles, I teach to groups of all kinds, certainly non-religious groups. They don't know where it originated, but I got it out of that source. So where do you think I got this definition of leadership that I think is the very best ever written: Working for their good and speaking for their welfare. It came out of that source. And I'm telling you that if you're going to lead people and you don't work for their good and speak for their welfare ahead of your own, you might as well retire. You might as well resign. You might as well do something else because you're not going to be effective for very long. And you're likely going to do more damage than you do good.
You mentioned a coach earlier that is in the city of Lubbock, Steve Gomez. I really believe that Steve Gomez has an outstanding character, but I believe at his leadership DNA, his heart, he intuitively understands that this is about others, not about me. And he works for their good and speaks for their welfare. Your sister can testify to that as one of his star players, one of the best players that's ever been on his court.
And that is a part of my thinking constantly, about working for their good speaking for their welfare. Let me tell you, I am far from perfect because I get this great big word that gets in the way, and that word is selfishness. And there's another great, big word that I fight against all the time. It's what I call the leadership disease. And that's ego out of control. Ego is wonderful. We all have an ego, but I'm going to tell you when it gets out of control, it makes you a monster and destroys everyone around you and destroys you. And it's ugly. I guess I can say this, but I have released more people with that problem for any more than for any other reason, because you cannot lead with your ego out of control. Arrogance kills leadership, every single time.
For a young leader listening to this podcast, or the one asking you the questions, what would be indicators or what would be a sign or red flag of someone who's really leading with an ego out of control from your experience? What are things you start to see?
That's easy. That's easy. Everybody's been around it so everybody can answer the question. People who have an ego out of control really think and act like their opinion is better than everybody else's opinion on every single subject. People who have their ego out of control want everyone to cater to them instead of working for their good. They think they're supposed to work for his or her good. Here's the big telltale sign. If you threaten them in any way, suppose I asked you a question, are you sure that's right? You threaten them in any way. You question them in any way, they go berserk. They retaliate. It gets ugly. The opposite of that is good, humble leadership. To understand that we're all people, we're all fallible.
So when I walk into the studio, I'll give you a real life example about you. I walked into the studio and you said, our guy that's supposed to be doing this podcast didn't notice his calendar, so he's going to be a bit late, but I was a bit early. And yet when he walks in, you smile at him and say in essence, it's no big deal. It's okay. How does that make him feel? Now if he's late every day and he's late on every situation, it's probably a different conversation. But the way you handled it today is the way a leader handles it. Because he's a great employee. He's an essential employee. He's a wonderful guy. And you're going to build him up by saying, it's okay. If that's the worst you do today, in your words, you're in great shape. Leaders get themselves out of the way.
It's easy to spot. Look at politicians. I get tired of looking at politicians because so many of them have their ego so far out of control, I think. Wow.
I think I've written this statement down about 10 times on my paper here because I don't want to forget it. Working for their good speaking for their welfare. This is the essence of what an elected official, a public servant should be doing. And all of us should be doing that, honestly. I mean, if we're in a position of leadership to your point, but because we're in a season right now where we're recording this podcast, where public leaders are on full display.
If I could, if I could talk to public leaders right now, as far up as the president of this wonderful country of ours. I would say, learn to work for their good and speak for their welfare. And it's not about you. And once they get that, if they ever get that, then they become wonderful leaders that we love from then on.
Something that really sticks out to me about what you said about an ego out of control is an ego out of control and feel free to disagree with this. I think the ego out of control also doesn't have the ability to say I was wrong. Here's where I was wrong. Here's what I've learned from it. Here's how we're going to try to move forward.
Ego out of control will not admit that it was wrong or ego out of control will often blame others. Ego out of control will often lie. Ego out of control believes they can get by with anything. And so they will cut corners and they'll believe they won't get caught.
Yeah. Which is interesting because the whole ego out of control is the antithesis to the leader who works for their good and speaks for their welfare. A stark contrast between the two polar opposites. I've been reading a lot lately on the history of political figures and the political climate, because you know, when you're living in a moment, you think that moment is either the greatest or the worst moment that's ever been, but when you read history, you see, we've actually been in moments like this. Something fascinating that's come to me as I've read these things, is there was a time where elected officials, Kennedy was one of them, said I was wrong. Here's where I was wrong, but we're going to move forward. And that climate doesn't exist now.
That's what we, as the American people, are craving. Ronald Reagan was loved. In his second election, he carried almost the entire United States because he was just real and he would laugh at himself.
Yeah 49 states.
And so he can be shot. And at the moment of death, and he opens his eyes, looked at a surgeon, say are you a Republican or Democrat? He's just filled with the sense that it is not about him. I was in Washington D.C. one time and a lady was there. She had roots at Lubbock Christian. And she had been one of his personnel standing behind him. She was in the Marines. She was one of those assigned to him. And she said, one day, we're having this reception, all these people come through the line, he just stopped things, got me and another person together and said, Hey, I just got word that one of our pilots was downed in an accident. Would you stop right now and pray for him? And I thought, wow, this is the President of the United States, who's got all these dignitaries trying to come through the line. And he turned around and he's worried about a downed pilot. I don't really believe it was ever about Ronald Reagan. I think it was about something larger than him. And it was primarily about the people.
That's really powerful. My last question for you, this has been so good. If you could speak to your younger self 20 or 30 years ago, what advice would you give yourself based on everything that you know now?
That's a loaded question, but let me tell you the one that popped in my mind first. I think it must be important. It's learning to be yourself. And learn it's okay to be you. Now it's not okay to be the you that you are for all your life. Cause you have to grow. You have to do personal growth, but may I tell you that as a leader, I thought for a long time, I had to fit a mold. And sometimes I would be in meetings with other leaders and other university presidents and come away thinking, I just can't do it like them. I must not be very good. And I get back and think, well, things are going pretty well though. So I would have a tendency to beat myself up because I didn't fit the mold until finally I recognized one day, what's the mold?
There are a few principles. If you live by these principles, you become a great leader or at least a decent leader. And so if you could just learn the principles and be yourself inside of those principles, it is an enormous strength. And it's what the leadership world now calls authenticity. And they spot you when you're faking, when you're trying to be something you're not. But if you can be the authentic you that you were created to be and designed to be that you're building and growing, there is such real power in that. People learn to love you because of it.
That's really good. Drayton McLane when he was on the podcast said a lot of amazing things, but one piece of advice he had was he said, write down your integrity. And he also talked about personal growth and knowledge. So what I really appreciate about what you just said, as you were qualifying as being comfortable and competent in who you are, as long as you're always growing, but being content there and not trying to be something you're not. We've made some really bad decisions along the way and learned from those failures. But when you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was I can literally identify multiple large scale business failures, mistakes, bad decisions that I made, because I was trying to be someone I wasn't. I can write a book on that. But it's really powerful to the degree that you're always evolving and learning. And so I really appreciate it.
But authenticity allows you to be vulnerable. It allows you to be a bit vulnerable and there's power in vulnerability. Now I'm not going to sit here on a podcast and tell you all of the mistakes and all the insecurities that Kim Jones has, but I will tell you that I'm not afraid to admit that I have kinks in my armor and I have failures and I have some faults and I'm flawed.Let's be real. That's part of being leadership.
That's really good. Thank you for your time. This has been a real joy. Like I said before we started recording, you know, I've always known your name. My sister went to school at LCU but I've never had the pleasure of meeting you and spending any time with you. So thanks for your willingness while you're in Lubbock to drop by the studio and to give us your time.
Thank you for allowing me to do it. You're talking about something I'm passionate about. So thank you.
Yeah, it's been a real pleasure.
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