Derek Stake came up as an engineer, and for years he ran his teams the way he ran a production line: manage the variation, follow the process, and the outcome takes care of itself. It worked, until it didn’t.

Becoming a father forced a patience with people that his engineering training never taught him, and a string of managers modeled a steadiness he wasn’t ready to receive until years later.

In this conversation, Derek traces that shift: the year he realized the problems he kept running into were his own, the Navy SEAL advice about failed parachutes that reshaped how he opens hard conversations, and the discipline of choosing consistency over intensity when people are watching how their leader responds.

Derek walks through the LRN360 and how structured feedback turns feedback from something he dreaded into something he now seeks out.

Show outline

• 01:40 Balancing process and people
• 04:03 What a decade of fatherhood changed
• 06:31 The mentors who modeled what he wasn’t ready to hear
• 10:24 The lesson from a failed parachute
• 14:08 Coaching discipline into a team
• 18:05 Rebuilding his relationship with feedback
• 21:43 What’s next: balancing the individual and the whole

Takeaways

1. Process protects against variation, but only people supply the creativity and speed that make a process better. The job is protecting both at once, not choosing one.
2. The biggest shift in Derek’s leadership didn’t come from a course. It came from becoming a parent, which forced a patience with people his engineering training never taught him.
3. A reflexive reaction gets overridden by one deliberate move: breathe first, then decide. It’s the same instruction given to a Navy SEAL whose parachute fails mid-jump.
4. Consistency, not intensity, is what a team actually trusts. People stop approaching a leader whose reaction they can’t predict.
5. Feedback stopped being a threat once Derek let it sit before responding, instead of defending or explaining it away in the moment. His own LRN360 was the starting point.
6. Happiness comes from the climb, not the summit. Treating the milestone as the source of happiness gets the order backward.

Resources We Mentioned

• Masters of Uncertainty, Rich Diviney
• Discipline Equals Freedom, Jocko Willink

Let’s Connect

• Derek Stake, VP of Operations and Engineering, The Cleveland Vibrator Company LinkedInCompany site
• Take the LRN 360:leadersrisingnetwork.com/360