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Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
From Firehouse to Executive Leadership - Nick Bonstell on Building a Culture of Trust & Empowerment
Ready to discover how firefighting lessons from the frontlines can transform your leadership and build a culture of trust, preparedness, and high performance?
In this episode, Nick Bonstell, President & CEO of Miss Dig 811, shares his journey from career firefighter to leading Michigan's excavation safety one-call system.
His transition from being a firefighter to executive leadership taught him the critical value of prevention over reaction. In emergency services, success often comes from proactive measures that prevent crises before they happen - a lesson he carries into his current role at MissDig811.
He emphasizes that his experience in the fire service instilled in him the importance of trust, servant leadership and creating a strong, mission-driven culture - principles that he now applies to leading organizations in both public and private sectors.
"If you can actively create an environment of psychological safety, where people feel safe to voice their concerns and try new things, you’re not just building a team - you’re creating a culture that drives innovation, engagement, and ultimately, success."
Nick discusses the challenges of organizational change, especially in aligning people and processes, and shares actionable insights on how leaders can empower their teams by fostering an environment where everyone feels safe to speak up, make decisions, and contribute to the organization’s mission.
Join us for an enriching conversation packed with practical lessons for leaders across all sectors, designed to inspire and elevate your leadership game.
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Welcome to the Leadership Lovers Podcast. I'm your host, W Gladheart, cmo at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Our guest today is Nick Bonstell, president and CEO of MissDig811. Thanks for taking the time to join us.
Nick Bonstell:Well, first of all, thanks for having me and thanks for all that you do with this podcast. I've learned a lot from it myself, and it's got to be a pretty fulfilling mission for you to deliver the information through your medium of the podcast as well.
William Gladhart:Oh well, thank you for that. Yeah, we learn a lot. Leaders learn a lot. I'm glad you got a few nuggets out of what we're doing, so let's start by having you share a little bit about yourself with our audience, your background and your organization as well.
Nick Bonstell:Oh, excellent. So thank you. Like I said before, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today and hopefully some of this information helps someone else in the future as well. Pass it on, that's the best way that I've always learned to lead, for sure. So I'm married. Actually, today, at the time of this recording, is my 19 years of marriage celebration today and yeah, yeah, it's gone by fast.
Nick Bonstell:It's been an amazing journey. We have three fantastic kids and they're all involved in dance and sports and all kinds of things. You know we have a high schooler and a couple of middle schoolers, and what I've learned from a lot of people who have been my mentors over the years is definitely to embrace the season of life that I'm in currently. So coaching sports and doing a lot of those things to support our kids as they grow. It's been a very, very fun ride so far From a leadership standpoint.
Nick Bonstell:From a work standpoint, one thing that will be kind of interesting is I actually started off my career as a career firefighter and spent the first decade of my career in the ranks of the men and women of the City of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Fire Department.
Nick Bonstell:The last 10 years, I've really spent a lot of time in executive leadership with public and private organizations, with a lot of those lessons that I learned over that first 10 years being able to pass that on to other areas that I learned over that first 10 years being able to pass that on to other areas. Currently I serve as the President and CEO for MISDIG 811, and we are the state of Michigan's excavation safety one-call system and our organization's mission and I talk about this every day with our team. The mission can never be understated, but the reason that we're here, our organization's mission, is to safeguard the public environment and member infrastructure through educational outreach and advancement and damage prevention processes. So we are the underground utility one call for all 10 million of the state of Michigan residents and every day we come to work we try to keep people safe through not damaging gas, electric and other underground utilities here in the state of Michigan. It's a noble mission.
William Gladhart:Yeah, no, I love that. You certainly. Managing a state is certainly a challenge in and of itself. One thing I just wanted to mention before we dive all the way in is that you had mentioned during our initial call that, as you said, spent a lot of time in the firefighter, in the reactive part of civic and public service, and now you are in the preventative piece, and that's somewhat what caught my attention, because I thought it was really interesting. You made that comment of making that shift to where you're making a difference beforehand. I think go ahead if you've got a comment about that.
Nick Bonstell:Yeah, and actually it's pretty funny too, because when you look at the world of emergency services, and whether it's through emergency management or being a firefighter or being a law enforcement officer, the holy grail of the investment for those services is actually on the front end in the prevention aspect. If you can actively create a fire safety program that eliminates the ability to have to respond to structure fires, that's a win for everyone involved. And basically that same framework comes into play with utility damage prevention. If you can prevent those incidents from occurring, you don't have to put the public at risk. You don't have to put equipment operators and men and women in the field who are working around these services every day at risk or the general community. It's a noble cause and a noble mission that we have to be able to try to actively prevent those incidents. Every day that our team comes to work, they're literally saving lives through coordination.
William Gladhart:That's amazing. So, as we start our conversation today, can you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Nick Bonstell:Yeah, I sure can. I think any high performing at least the way I look at it and through the years I've talked to a lot of different organizations is there is a direct relationship between how healthy a organization's culture is to how that organization is performing. I think you would be very hard pressed to find a organization that's at the top of their game doing awesome things, who you talk to someone in the organization and they're telling you that the culture is just horrible to work in. It's actually quite the opposite. Usually those are the people who are very excited to tell you about what they do. They're engaged in the work that they do every day. They feel a sense of purpose when they come to work. One of the big things is that all high-performing organizations have high-performance cultures, so culture is really everything. It's a foundation.
Nick Bonstell:Where I learned a lot about culture and where I started to really understand the impact that culture plays is really back to my fire service roots, and I learned a couple pretty interesting leadership lessons there from those days. One of them is the fact that you have leaders who literally are brought up to eat last, so when everyone's gathering around a big meal, they are the last ones to sit down and that is really the servant form of leadership that leads to a healthy culture that says are the last ones to sit down, and that is really the servant form of leadership that leads to a healthy culture that says we're here to serve you. It's a organization that's got origins and service and what that leads to is a really increased relationship of trust, even to a point where, in those cases, that person who's right next to you, you are going to trust with your life and you're going to verify that through training, you're going to verify that through the way you interact. But in the end of the day, when it's two o'clock in the morning and the bell goes off, that person you have to trust with your life. So the culture is probably never as more important as in those cases where you have to trust that person on a whim with your life.
Nick Bonstell:So, taking a lot of those lessons learned, learning how really the mission and the alignment with people and their personal values, how those personal values align with the culture that is in an organization, those are what really drives winning teams, and the winning teams, the teams that win, are the teams that definitely have a really healthy culture, and I think it's absolutely critical to everything we do. I'll even put it up on a pedestal and say that it is the number one thing. If you are not taking the time to nurture the culture within your organization, in the end that's going to lead to process problems, that's going to lead to problems with profit, that's going to lead to problems down the road. So we first have to take care of the people who take care of our customers and take care of the teams that we support.
William Gladhart:Absolutely. I love that you wrapped in that trust factor, the communication element, but also that you kind of brought to light about all the different components which touch on our next question about people process or profits. So it's been our experience that leaders struggle with three key areas, as noted people process or profits. In your role as CEO, could you identify which one of these three areas represented a cultural challenge within your own organization?
Nick Bonstell:Yeah, I think probably every CEO out there could probably draw conclusions from each three of these areas, and I don't think there's ever a day in a CEO's life where you're like, okay, we're good, we really don't have anything to focus on today. So there's always the opportunity to improve in all three of these areas. And I'll say for myself and I'll just kind of walk through my own personal journey is, you know, I'm within my first year here, within Mystic 811. It's been a very, very fun journey for me to come into an organization that I've worked with from the outside but I've never really interacted with on the inside. And one of the very first things that I did is set some time to just assess current conditions and not dive into throwing everything out and reinventing everything, because there's a lot of good things that are working in the right direction. So what I was able to do in the first 90 days is we have 72 team members statewide. What I did was in the first 90 days, I did one-on-ones with every single one of those folks and I learned all about what encourages, what do they like to do on the engagement side, what are they interested in, what are their passions, what are their pursuits in life, and that gives me a really good understanding on the people side as to where I need to focus and what I need to build and what I need to create as far as a situation to set the culture to have a lot of engagement for the future. And one of the things that I did learn in this process was the importance of and I know we talk about this quite a bit nowadays, but for me it is very important is psychological safety, and I truly feel that it's on us as leaders in any organization to create the environment where people feel safe enough to voice their concerns, safe enough to voice when they think something is unsafe, safe enough and daring enough to try new things and really make decisions and not wait for people to make decisions.
Nick Bonstell:So for me, my number one goal was role. I had worked as a leader in safety and emergency management within a natural gas utility and one of the things that we increased in that role was our ability to conduct lessons learned from incident investigations. So if you think about like incident investigations, there's two ways that you can take that. One is it can be a punitive process, or two, as an organization, you can build a culture and say, hey, every time we have one of these, we're going to learn something from it. And the way that we're going to learn something from it is we're going to have the people who were directly involved with this teach us, tell us exactly what went wrong, tell us exactly what we need to learn from. Well, in order to do that, you have to create a really deep foundation of psychological safety Because, as you know, will not everyone's just going to raise their hand and say yeah, let me tell you where I might have messed up in this process.
Nick Bonstell:So, it took a few years to really build that foundation. It was not something that just occurred overnight, but what a beautiful thing when it does. And all of a sudden, the team starts to rally around. Hey, when we have these incidents and when we do these after action reviews, we want to be engaged and instead of waiting for us to put them together, they're putting them together themselves and documenting the lessons learned from those actions. For me, I took that lesson and I brought it over to our current role and I'm really working to develop that deep foundation of psychological safety and making sure that we create a platform and environment where everyone can move this organization forward, because it's not just on me, it's on all of us to come up with the great ideas that are going to be the next big thing in what we do.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think you definitely identified that the one challenge was really around the people, but also the process, psychological safety, etc. How did you, as the leader, go about developing that that impacted your culture positively?
Nick Bonstell:Yeah, and I think this goes right back to another term that gets thrown out a lot, but it's really servant leadership. And I'll go right back to the roots. A lot of people think when they look at fire service organizations, you know they look at that organization as really an older style top-down management structure. But really what they don't understand about how that is actually done in an emergency field is the training and the relationships and the trust and everything that's built ahead of time turns into very broad delegation and it's very not task-oriented. So you might be given an overall objective to complete, but you're figuring out the tactics of how you get to create and finalize.
Nick Bonstell:That objective is we want to really embrace the ability for each of our members, each of the people who build this organization, each of the people who come to work every day, to really make decisions and to really have the ability to be close to our customers, be close to our stakeholders and not have to go through large processes to really get a decision made. I think when we do that it leads to increased engagement, it leads to the ability for those folks to align closer to our mission and it just increases the attentiveness and the impact on our culture. So for me it's not the overall directing and definitely, if we're all looking at me for every single answer, we're going to be in a world of problems here Will. So that's why we have really, really smart people who are well-trained and we continue to let them do the good decision-making, and they are the ones closest to the problem in many cases.
William Gladhart:I love that you speak about empowering your organization, empowering other leaders, but also sharing that message across the board in terms of psychological safety, helping others understand that they have ownership in the mission, the identity of the organization, and moving that needle forward. So, as we wrap up today, is there anything else you'd like to share for fellow leaders?
Nick Bonstell:Well, I think you know, I would say, whether it's a fellow leader or whether it's a person who's inspiring to maybe move into a role in a future organization to where they can have, you know, large scale impact across the organization.
Nick Bonstell:I would say that, for me, large-scale impact across the organization. I would say that, for me, what fires me up every day, what brings me into jumping out of bed in the morning to basically come into work, is the fact that I have a unique opportunity to better the lives of all of our team members here, and some of the proudest moments that I've ever had in life are when someone either grows a new task or skill and whether they stay with the organization or move on, I see them and their families achieve more and do better, and there's no better feeling that any leader can have. So, whether you're a fellow leader or one that's growing into different roles, it's all about the people and it's all about the lives that you impact, whether it's inside the organization or the stakeholders that your organization touches. So just always keep that in mind. You know that we are in unique positions and we should always be full of gratitude that we are in a unique position to impact people's lives in a very positive manner.
William Gladhart:Yeah, so, Nick, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you so much for your insights. All right, thank you Will.
William Gladhart:Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers Podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethink tank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
