125: Celebrating People Leads to Celebrating Wins with Hank Fortener

Pete Mockaitis
Hank, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Hank Fortener
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have a fun, unique, interesting childhood background story. Can you give us a little bit of the scoop on what it’s like growing up with 36 foster kids in the home?

Hank Fortener
Yeah. So, I grew up in Ohio, and my mom and dad had three of us biologically, and then my dad said that God put him on earth to make my mom happy, and my mom said that God put her on earth to be a mother. And so after three of us, biologically, we opened up our home, and we were a state-certified foster home, and over the seven-year period we had 36 foster brothers and sisters.
And, as you can imagine, if you put 36 kids anywhere, now, obviously 36 children were not in our home at one time, it was usually only the three of us and then like maybe three other kids, mostly two or three at the time. And if you do that in any sense there’s some chaos, mealtimes were pretty insane, mornings were just a total every-man-for-himself free-for-all but it was amazing.
I would say going on outings were probably the most chaotic when we would love up in our parent’s – my mom had a 15-passenger van, like a people mover, and we would get out of the car and go to Walmart or to the grocery store, or whatever, and people would just stare at us like this was some kind of freakish program. That was probably our main experience. But it was amazing. It was amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so tell me, I’d like to know, how do you think that’s left marks on you in a positive way? Then the here and now, like how do you think you, your personality or your preferences are different as a result of having been shaped in that environment?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it affected me and my two other biological siblings, I think it affected us all different. Me, being the opposite. My biological sister and biological brother are very… they draw a circle around their family and family is everything, and the way that translates is if you aren’t family you’ll know that, you’ll know you aren’t family.
For me, family is everything was exactly the way I responded, but I responded in a sense that family is not blood, last names, color or ethnicity. Family is anybody that I say, “I love this person.” So, that translated for me because it became anywhere I met a person, I was like, “Hey, this could be my future brother or person that’s as close as a brother,” so to speak.
My wife and I got in a fight right before our wedding because I wanted to put a guy on the guest list that I had met a couple of weeks earlier, and she’s like, “What are you talking about? We don’t know this guy.” I’m like, “No, we’re going to be close. I can feel it.” Like in her mind that was such an offensive thing to assume, like, “We’re not inviting people we do know and you’re going to invite this guy you’ve only known for two weeks.” I’m like, “No, we’re going to be friends.”
And so I think that’s how it affected me most is when I meet people I don’t have bars up or walls up. I don’t live by the “no-new-friends” philosophy. If anything, I live by the “everyone-is-potentially-family” philosophy. I think that’s probably how it affected me most.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really cool. And when it comes to families one of your main claims to fame is you’ve done some great work that enables families to get put together, so, boy, I’m sure we could talk for hours about this. But could you give us the couple-minute tale of what is AdoptTogether and how did it come into existence?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, yeah. So, my parents, after 36 foster kids, we adopted eight kids from six different countries. So I have eight brothers and sisters, all multi ethnic. And my parents hit a certain age where they couldn’t adopt anymore, the countries wouldn’t accept an age gap of 45 years or more. So my dad called, I remember he called me right after he left his company, and he said, “Hey, I really want to do something in adoption. We want to start a foundation. Think about it.”
And I did, and I called him about a month later and said, “Hey, let’s start a…” and I think at the time I used the word Kiva, let’s start Kiva for adoption. I had a friend who wanted to adopt and they came to me and said, “Hey, adoption is so expensive. How did your parents afford this?” And I just said, “I don’t know. When you’re spending your parents’ money you have no concept that money is real or right.” So, if any of your listeners are here and they have access to their parents’ money they should spend that as much and as often as they can.
But I think, for me, I didn’t realize that that was the barrier, and what I came to find out is that 87% of families who consider adoption don’t move forward because they say it’s just too expensive. So, I said, “Hey, let’s launch a website that people can donate to this family.” And there was nothing out there like actual Kickstarter, GoFundMe, there was no crowdfunding B2C concept that was out there yet, Kiva was a micro-lending which was about all that the market had kind of seem.
I called my dad, I said, “Hey, let’s start one page.” And in his wisdom he said, “Let’s actually start a page but let’s build it like a platform as if…” and I think he made a joke, he’s like, “As if we have a hundred families.” And I was like, “Right. Right. Like there’s a hundred families who would do this. Let’s just do it for my one friend.”
But we built the software and he has a software database engineering background, so he engineered it and we found some designers and we got the thing together, and then we launched it on my birthday. And instead of asking for money, we looked at everybody and said, “Hey, would you support this family through this website?” And pulled it up on iPad, I think. The iPad had just come out, I think. And we were just excited to launch it, and that was five years ago, and it still is and has been the first ever and world’s largest crowdfunding platform for adoption. And we had helped 2500 families raise about $10.7 million to bring their kids home.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is beautiful. Well, thank you. That’s so cool that the world is blessed by having this present now. So awesome, awesome work. And I’m also curious to hear, in your photos you have smiley faces drawn on your hand. What’s the skinny there?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, absolutely. So, the skinny on those smiley faces, about two years in, so in 2014, we were going to hit our $5 million, and I said, “We’ve got to celebrate this. We’ve got to throw a party.” One of my advisors and friends and a huge supporter of AdoptTogether has been Scott Harrison from Charity: Water, and I pitched the idea to him at the very beginning, wanted him to do it, and he said, “No way. This is for you.”
And every time I would send him a landmark that we’ve hit, like every time I said, “Hey, we hit a million dollars. We got our 5213, whatever.” He would only reply with these three words, “Throw a party,” because he knew that the community has to be a part of what’s happening and as the movement. So, I said, “I know what Scott is going to say. We’re about to hit five million, let’s throw a party.”
So we said, “Let’s just a throw a party on World Adoption Day.” And we called the U.N., we looked all over the internet, we looked everywhere, and we could not find a World Adoption Day. We found it but it did not exists. And so I said, “Well, we know what we’re going to do for our $5 million.” So on November 9th in 2014, we launched the first ever World Adoption Day and we invited people to put a smiley face on their hand and use the hashtag, and it was incredible.
We had ambassadors from over 13 countries. It was celebrated in over 33 countries. We were trending on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook for the entire day, and we just had our third World Adoption Day and it’s been incredible. We’ve had celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Charlize Theron, and we’ve had Shaquille O’Neal, and athletes from every direction you can imagine. It’s been really amazing to watch people from a grassroots level around the world as well as celebrities get behind the movement of World Adoption Day.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is so cool. Yes, it’s really fun to see, too. Just puts a smile on your face when you’re looking at those photos of folks looking happy and they’ve got their hands extended and there’s a smiley drawn on it, so that’s so cool. Well, we could chat about your social entrepreneurial journey but there are other shows that specialize more so in that, and we are talking more so about kind of universal skills that help folks flourish at work.
And so it seems you’ve done a fine job of teasing out some of the key components that have made things successful here at AdoptTogether and your other initiatives, and you’ve even sort of have the opportunity to package that and speak with some large audiences and clients, to Sony and Cardinal Health on things like leadership        and teaming. So, could you lay it on us, what are some of the key takeaways, insights, learnings about leadership that you share with these big clients?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, absolutely. So, in the workplace, I would say my biggest mentor and now my partner in some initiatives is a guy by the name of Keith Ferrazzi. He wrote a book called Never Eat Alone. He wrote another book called Who’s Got Your Back? He was really a huge mentor and a huge influence in my life and is a very close friend. And what we’ve put together and really how I informed AdoptTogether and World Adoption Day is we saw so many similarities to not only sort of the tribal focus that I had but also for him the corporate focus.
And as we got together and as we started dialoguing we realized that so much of what we did were similar but just in different worlds. His was very B2B and mine was very consumer to consumer and peer to peer, it was kind of the world we lived in. So, when it comes to Cardinal Health, when it comes to Sony, when it comes to giving talks, in most places what I find is that it’s the same with World Adoption Day, the same with AdoptTogether is that everybody wants to be a part of something and they want to know that what they’re a part of matters.
The quickest way to kill momentum with employees, the quickest way to kill momentum with your team is to make them think that their input and that their influence is not going to be celebrated, it’s not going to be measured, is that their efforts are not in any way, shape or form going to make a difference to the whole.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Hank Fortener
And all of us, no matter what organization we’re in, you’re a small part of a big thing, you’re a small part of a whole whether that’s you being one of a hundred donors to bring a child home, you of one of 100,000 smiley faces that might cross the world, whatever it is, everybody knows that they’re a part of that small piece. But it’s so essential that people are celebrated.
So, when I think about ways in which people are in leadership, there’s a few thoughts I have when it comes to leading a team. The most important thing you can do is you have to know your team and you have to make sure they’re known by somebody. There’s an old cliché that says you have to have a best friend at work, and if you have a best friend at work you’ll stay. I think that’s a little exaggerative. I don’t know that that’s the right move, but a person wants to be known at work.
If you lead a team, you want to know intimate details about that person’s life. Bill Clinton, for example, is one of the guys who’s known for knowing his butler’s grandson’s favorite football team, that he would remember all of these things, and people who had worked with him just felt extraordinarily close because Bill Clinton’s ability to remember things about their life. The most important thing is that your team feels known.
One of the things that Keith taught me that I implement really in any organization or team that I lead, additionally when I go and speak, is there’s a tool called personal/professional check-in. You can do this in any team, you can do this in any scenario, you can do this in any social scenario, you can do this in a public scenario. I do this with executives of Fortune 500 and it’s amazing what you have is each person gets one minute to share, “How am I doing personally” and “How am I doing professionally.”
What that does is it doesn’t start us off with agendas or small talk or any randomness. What it does is it starts us off right away starting to feel empathy for each other and calming down that sort of reptilian, survival, stress, anxiety brain and wakes us up to each other that there’s human beings across the table from each other, and gives your team members a sense of being known.
So, the first thing I would do is just be aware, “Do I know my team members? Do I know their kids’ names? Do I know who they are? Am I communicating with them about their personal life in addition to their professional life? And do they know each other?” So, facilitating dialogue and conversation among your teams so that they’re for each other and that they can implement each other. I think being known is really, really essential.
I think, secondly, it’s really important that people are celebrated. Like I mentioned earlier, in order for a person to be celebrated you’ve got to be able to measure their work, you have to be able to acknowledge that they’re the ones that made that contribution, and you have to celebrate them in big ways or small. And that may not mean that you have to figure out a way to give them a huge raise, you don’t have to throw a party for someone every time they “do their job,” but there’s this generational gap where doing your job used to be just do your job, and if you did your job and you did really, really well, that got you to zero. That meant you’re like, “Okay, well, you’re not bad at this. You’re good at this.”
But in this day and age we live in a world where when people go through extraordinary efforts you need to acknowledge that. And in my experience, both with teams and in what I’ve worked with companies on, when you can celebrate people and you can celebrate their unique contribution it’s the same as it comes to a donor with AdoptTogether, it’s the same when it comes to World Adoption Day, it’s the same when it comes with a company like Cardinal Health with tens of thousands of employees, you want to acknowledge their unique contribution because it honors their dignities as human beings and it helps them see that, “What I’m doing here is actually making a difference to the people I’m doing it with.”
So, if they’re known and if they’re celebrated, what you have is you have a sense in which people are actually a part of a team. One of the things that Keith and I talk a lot about is this idea of radical interdependency. And for us to actually succeed we have to support each other, we have to believe in each other and we have to actually be for each other. For me to succeed, I have to be for the people who are on my team to the service of the mission that we’ve all signed on for and that we all get paid for and we all get measured by, but then I also have to be for them independently.
I’m the kind of guy who I like to let people, I like to celebrate when a person transitions. I like to graduate people out of working for me, or with me, as often as possible. Where if it feels like a person’s heart or desires or feels like their mindset or their career trajectory is going in a different way, I like to end that early and often, and just go, “Hey, it looks to me like this is the direction you’re going. Find the first opportunity in that direction and we’ll celebrate that with you.”
I think that’s another big part is I think it’s a matter of looking at it and saying, “Hey, I am only as good as the team that I’m around, and that means that I’m going to have to invest in them as individuals, I’m going to have to know them, I’m going to have to celebrate them, and I’m going to have to foster an environment of radical interdependency.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there’s so much good stuff there. And so I want to dive in a little bit on some of the tools in terms of you mentioned the one-minute check-in, and this reminds me of my days at The Bridgespan Group doing non-profit consulting, it was funny. We did not constrain ourselves to one minute. We had a bunch of non-profity feelers and it might take 25 minutes for a group of four.

Hank Fortener
Sure. You’ve got to be vigilant and you almost feel like you’ve got to be rude because, here’s the thing, if you do a personal/professional check-in the first three times and it takes a half an hour and now the meeting has to be rushed, then everyone is going to roll their eyes when you do it again. You’ve got to be like vigilant and you, as the leader, you’ve got to start that off. You’ve got to go, “Look, here’s where I am.”
Now, the only way that a personal/professional check-in works is if the leader displays vulnerability. You have to start off by saying, “My wife and I are in pre-marital counseling, that’s how I’m doing personally. It’s a difficult season for us. And, professionally, I’m feeling a little nervous about us as a team. I don’t know if we’re going to make our…” You have to hit and you have to hit it hard, and you’ve got get there fast. If a person is going to take 20 minutes you’re never going to get this to be a part of the culture of your team.
So, yeah, you have to be rude and just be like, “Hey, Caroline, I know you’re having a hard day. We need you to give it to us quick.” Does that make sense? Like, you kind of have to just step in, because I think there’s a sense in which when you blend the personal and the professional, people are very hesitant to do that because they’re worried about the guy who would complain about the gout in his grandmother and his aging parents, and they’re worried about the guy who would sort of word-vomit on people. And that is true. Everyone has that guy at work that you avoid because you’re like, “Oh, geez, he’s going to tell me about his kid’s soccer game again.” Like you don’t want to, “I don’t have the bandwidth mentally for that.”
But what I find is that people, those are what I would consider like outbursts because they don’t feel like there’s an integration of personal and professional lives so they’re doing that which that should only be a signal that if you integrated the personal and professional amongst the culture of your community then you wouldn’t have that, and you’d actually find a way that two seconds about the soccer game could turn into about 30 minutes of really productive work talk. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is so good.

Hank Fortener
So, the person who is vomiting on you about their personal life, all that’s happening is it’s their insides and their psyche going, “I’m pretending like my personal and my professional are not integrated, but I’m only one person. I don’t have a personal self and a professional self. If I’m not good, if my wife and I are not good, I’m not going to be good in this meeting either.” And I think that’s what we have the opportunity to integrate is to integrating those two and being really vigilant about the boundaries around that can create a really healthy culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is potent. And so, Hank, could you give us a demo right now if I want to do a personal/professional check-in with you one minute today, what would you say?

Hank Fortener
All right. I’ll get there quick. On a professional level I feel simultaneously over-enjoyed and overwhelmed. I have had more opportunities come my way in the last six months than I’ve ever had in my life, and I feel a little bit like my friend describes my life right now as a Rumspringa which is when the Amish kids are given a year to kind of do whatever they want. I sort of feel liberated to kind of go, “I’m just going to say yes to everything until it becomes a no.” And so on a professional level I feel just exhilarated and yet simultaneously like I’ve over-committed in a way.
On a personal level, I have a two-year old and a four-year old, and they are the biggest joys of my entire life. I love being around them. And the crisis is as the professional level increases that’s less time to be with my girls, so I fight that tension probably every day. That’s where I would be on a personal level.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is good. Thank you. I’d also like to follow-up. So, you gave us a great tool with the check-in. Does another tool come to mind, maybe tool is not even the word, but there’s so many different ways to celebrate people. Could you maybe just give us a hit list of a few of your favorites?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, I think one of the best ways to do it is you pick a person. I used to do this for birthday parties and it got a little intense so now I do it for workspaces, which is you pick a person and everybody goes around and they give a toast to that person. And the toast is the oldest way of celebrating a person and gives them a perfect excuse to say things that would feel awkward emotionally to say over a water cooler or one on one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Hank Fortener
When it comes to a toast, so I’ll do that over lunch. You don’t have to have any alcohol. It can be a totally dry environment. It could be like a Mormon Church staff or something and you could still accomplish the same thing I’m saying, “Hey, one at a time we’re going to get a chance to give people a toast.”
On birthdays I flip it around. So, when it someone’s birthday and it’s ten of us at dinner for a friend’s birthday, I let them give a toast. And I tell them, “You get to go around all ten people and you get to tell us what you admire about every person here and why you invited us to be a part of your dinner.” Because it’s counterintuitive, it becomes really exciting.
I think you can do the exact same thing with your team. And when you have a person in your team that you know is killing it, you invite the team to say, “Hey, we’re all going to spend this lunch and we’re all going to toast Caroline, Sarah, Mark, Dina. We’re going to toast their efforts and how incredible they’ve been.” And you’ll be amazed if you create that as a practice within the organization, how people will start to create a category in their brain for catching people doing amazing things.
One of the things we know about the human brain is that it’s impossible for your brain to ignore questions. So, if I asked you a question and I say, “Pete, what color is the car parked in the first space outside of your building?” You’ll be like, “Ah, I don’t know.” But then if I asked you every single day you come to work, “Pete, what color is the car parked outside of your building?” When you walk, you won’t even realize you’re doing it, but your brain will be like, “This annoying douche guy is going to come over to me and he’s going to ask me what the first car, and I’m going to look over,” and you’re going to see it, and then you’re going to say, “It’s black, that’s what the color of the car is.”
It’s the exact same thing when it comes to team leadership. You, as a leader, have the opportunity to create brain buckets, for lack of a better phrase, for what you want your people to see. So, when you ask questions, what questions you ask are going to determine the things your people see. So, what you ask, “Hey, how can we celebrate Dina? How can we celebrate Sarah, or Annie?” Then people will start to go, “Ah, it’s Dina’s dinner. I better start paying attention to how she’s operating. I better start paying attention to how we’re interacting. I better start paying attention to what it is.” And you’ll have your team spotting each other being successful and doing well, and you’ll actually have them celebrating that without the formality of a toast.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. It’s so good. I also want to cover quickly, so, on your speaking page you mentioned that your favorite topic is spirituality. And so I’d like to get your take, having sort of straddled the world as a teaching pastor as well as doing some cool stuff with corporate folk, how does spirituality have an impact on folks being awesome at their jobs?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, you cannot divorce a person’s spirituality from their psychology or their mentality or really their career. So, for me, it’s all entirely integrated. So, even, it’s a hypocritical statement to say my favorite topic is spirituality because I come from the camp that says that everything is actually spiritual.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Hank Fortener
How you are as a father, how you are as a husband, how you are as a human being is a spiritual act. And so why I love talking about spirituality is I love to sit down and I love to have dialogues with people about how they sense what is happening in the back of their mind. Oftentimes spirituality really is that space inside of us that we’re less likely to articulate, the space inside of us that is my friend “Science Mike” describes is it transcends language.
There are things that happen to the human existence and things that happen in your existence that transcend language. You don’t even have words for it. You feel this when you’re in love. You feel this when you have kids. You feel this when you’re in a beautiful place. You feel this when you have soldiers with PTSD who don’t talk about what happened. They’re not keeping a secret. What the heinous things that happened to them actually transcend language. These things are across the spectrum of human experience.
So, when it comes to your spiritual life, you have a spiritual life within you. What I love doing is I love dialoguing with that and exploring what it’s like to see what’s happening to us spiritually through the lens of what happens to us as fathers and as dads, what happens to us as husbands and wives, what happens to us as individuals in our workplace.
So, if you’re leading a team, or if you’re at work, when you’re unwell spiritually, meaning when your interior world is not healthy, you’re not going to fully excel at your job. When you are unwell spiritually or if your team is unwell spiritually, or there’s a bad vibe, and we use different words for it like vibe or energy, but when there’s a bad energy in your team, you’re not going to achieve all the numbers you need, and you’re not going to get to that right place.
What needs to happen is realize that growth and potential and being awesome at life, because I love that your podcast, Pete, is all about being awesome at your job, but I think being awesome at your job requires you to be awesome at life. Because here’s the deal, if you’re not a good father, or you’re not a good husband, or things are really crappy at home, it’s going to be really hard for you to turn that switch off and go, “Well, at least I’m really good here at the office.” There’s going to be places where that suffers.
And I think to be awesome at life you have to be aware of your spirituality. Hey, take a deep breath and connect to your higher power. You’ve got to, in my language, I use the language you’ve got to connect to God. That involves prayer, that involves meditation, and that really involves inviting yourself to be open to that non-language experience that happens inside your body.
Lots of friends and I, we do a lot of research and we do a lot of reading and a lot of exploring around the values that occur to your body and around the upside of a spiritual life regardless of what you believe. So, even if, let’s just go this way, this is like the modern Pascal’s wager, is even if God does not exists, the practice of spirituality is good for your brain, it’s good for the longevity of your life and it’s good for your health. You’re less likely to die a week that you attend a religious service. You are 40% less likely to die a week you attend a religious service, and your lifespan and likelihood for heart disease, your likelihood for heart disease decreases by 33% if you meditate once a week. Your lifespan is likely to increase by 18% if you just have regular spiritual practice in your life.
So, for me, I have a deep spiritual faith obviously but I know that the spiritual practices are good for everyone. It’s good to help them become great dads, great fathers, great humans and be awesome at life so that they, too, can be awesome at their jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you for that. Well, so now, you tell me, Hank, is there anything you want to make sure that you put out there before we shift gears and you quickly tell us about some of your favorite things?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, I would say, you know, I love doing podcasts like this and, Pete, I think your audience are my people. And there’s a woman named Martha Beck who wrote a book called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. And she talked about the tribe, she gives this concept of the tribe. And I feel like, Pete, the reason that you reached out and the reason that I get to be on your podcast is because you’re a part of the tribe. So, for me, I’d love to stay connected to anybody who’s listening and hearing and going, “Yeah, I like that.”
I’m in the process of writing a book and so I would love you guys to connect. I have a podcast called Hank Presents on iTunes, and then I also have an email list where I send weekly emails where I help people not only with their work life but I help them with their personal and their spiritual life as well. So, you can find all that at HankFortener.com.
So, I’ll just invite you to join me or you can join me, I’m most active on Facebook and Instagram. My Instagram is just @Hank.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, appreciate it. So, let’s dig into it a bit. Tell us, for starters, a favorite quote, something that inspires you.

Hank Fortener
So I don’t have to commit all the way through. It’s one actually I just put on my Instagram and it inspired my next live event that I’m doing, is Charles Bukowski said, “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” And, for me, I fundamentally believe that life is an adventure and it is a wildly typically hazardous experience, and there will be fire. And it’s about how you face the fire both internally and externally. It’s about how you embrace this wild, amazing life. So, for me, that’s my favorite quote right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Hank Fortener
There’s a book called how Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg. It’s both of those things. It’s a book that is study and research about how language centers in the brain can actually alter your neural paths. And if you’re a leader, actually it doesn’t even matter, if you’re a human being that interacts with other human beings you need to read that book. It gives you just a sense of how language, both speed and pace of language, how dictation, how words, how self-talk, self-narrative, how the language center of your brain has just an unbelievable capacity to both influence people and influence yourself as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. And do you have a favorite tool, whether it’s a piece of hardware or software, or app, or product service that helps you be awesome at your job?

Hank Fortener
Funny you asked. I just got the iPad Pro, the big 12-inch one or 13-inch one. That thing is amazing, with the pencil and the keyboard. I don’t think I’m ever going to buy a laptop again.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be more awesome?

Hank Fortener
That is a great question. CrossFit is the first thing that comes to mind. When I’m physically fit I feel like I can do anything. When I’m not physically fit, and I feel soft and jiggly and out of shape, I sort of feel like I’m dying. So, maybe that’s personal, I think. But my favorite habit is when I can get into a CrossFit gym, and I’ve never been injured in CrossFit and I know there’s a lot of people who have, probably because I was never good at sports so I don’t have that like “I have to beat everybody” mentality. But CrossFit has probably been one of the most life-changing habits of my life and I do that as often as I can.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And would you say there’s a particular sort of articulation of your message or a resonant nugget you share that really seems to get people sort of sharing on social media, or nodding their heads, or taking notes with a theory?

Hank Fortener
I would say a Hank original quote, the first one that comes to mind is that you are more powerful than you realize.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And, let’s see, you mentioned the best place to get in touch is over at your website. Is that HankFortener.com?

Hank Fortener
Yup, HankFortener.com or to get in touch with me on Facebook.com/HankFortener. Facebook is I’m super interactive there. I respond within the hour. So I just got verified on Facebook which gives you this amazing app that helps you do that. It’s really been a blast to connect with everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Well, congratulations. And would you say, do you have a particular final call to action or challenge for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Hank Fortener
Yeah, I think if you’re seeking to be more awesome at your job the most important thing you can do is care for and know and have the back of the people to your right and left. The more people are in this dog-eat-dog world, I had a conversation with a guy today at lunch where he said, “I don’t know what it is about Los Angeles, but it feels like there’s just politics everywhere and everybody is one conversation away from screwing their friends.”
And, for me, I just think that’s the tragic thing, and I think if you want to be awesome at your job be awesome to the people at your job, be awesome to the relationships at your job, be loyal, be fiercely resistant to gossip and to backbiting and throwing people under the bus, and be the kind of person that people can trust and be for people, whether that’s in your company or outside your company as human beings.
And I think what we’re going to see, as that catches on, is we’re going to observe that people are going to move to a place where we all are healthier as a collective and as a whole. If you want to be awesome at your job you have to believe in people and you’ve got to get to that place where the people who believe in you can be trusted with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Hank, it’s been such a treat. Thank you for taking this time amidst your myriad of opportunities. I wish you much luck in navigating them and I hope they work out in an optimal way.

Hank Fortener
Amazing. Thank you, Pete, so much and I love your podcast. I love what’s happening. I love that there’d be people who would listen to this and say, “How to be awesome at my job?” For you to invest in yourself and be awesome at your job, the sky is the limit for a person who’s willing to do the work in themselves. So that would be my admonishment. My last word is I get to interact with thousands of people, employees, CEOs, bosses.
I get to interact with thousands of employees at all sorts of stages around the world, and what I find is the singular habit that gets people to succeed and gets people to stop is they’re willing to do the hard work on themselves, to acknowledge what needs to change and to move forward and to do the work to grow. And so, Pete, your podcast is a part of that so I’m really grateful to be a part of that and hope anything I’ve said gives people who are listening some of the tools to move to their highest self.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Well, thank you, and I think it has and this has been a treat. So, keep on rocking.

Hank Fortener
Excellent. Thank you, Pete. You have a great one.