During a fireside chat, leadership consultant Joe Lara (also a former U.S. Navy cryptologist) told the audience at the recent Legal League Spring Servicer Summit that leaders must be humble, courageous, and disciplined.
The Summit unfolded on Thursday, March 26, at the historic Hotel Adolphus in Dallas. Lara is the founder of Find the X, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Business that provides leadership development, talent development, and career transition support for organizations operating in complex, high-responsibility environments. Lara has spent more than 30 years helping leaders and teams thrive across military, nonprofit, and corporate environments.
During a conversation with Gina Gallutia, the Five Star Institute’s Executive Director of Membership, Lara emphasized the importance of employee engagement, citing a Gallup study from 2022 that noted 31% of U.S. employees are engaged, with 17% being actively engaged.
“There’s a study that goes out every year on workforce engagement in the U.S.,” Lara said. “This is something that should maybe alarm you.”
Lara said, “So, 31% of associates and employees in America are engaged. That means one in three is actually excited on Sunday night. They’re not dreading Monday morning. That means that two out of three are disengaged.”
He said that those workers are “doing what they have to do to keep the job,” he continued. “In fact, 17% are people who are actively disengaged. These are people who are openly rolling their eyes in a meeting, maybe showing up late on purpose, turning in work late intentionally.”
Lara said the engagement was “trending pretty well, but if you look right around COVID, that’s when it dropped dramatically, and we haven’t recovered.”
Lara said that as leaders, you can’t assume that other associates want to be there. Engagement, he said, is important, and disengagement is a problem.
“What happens when I allow it? Well, it looks like we lose a lot of productivity,” Lara said. “But man, if my associates are engaged, and on Sunday night, they’re excited, we’re going to be more productive. We’re going to crush it. The data is there to show that there’s a problem and that leaders need to adjust to meet that problem.”
After leaving the Navy, where he was embedded as a cryptologist with a SEAL unit, Lara worked for Carrington Mortgage Services and then founded a nonprofit called Find the X.
What Is Find the X?
“This is my nerd coming out,” explained Lara. “In mathematics, X is the unknown. As a coach, that’s what I do. I help people discover what the unknown is, and it has direct ties to my military career.”
Find the X helps leaders strengthen their decision-making, build trust across teams, and navigate key career moments with clarity and purpose. Its work emphasizes practical application, ethical leadership, and sustained performance over time.
Lara provided the context of his transition.
“Self-reflection is always key. And in reflecting upon this, you’re probably asking, what is a cryptologist doing with the SEAL team? And so, this is where ‘find the X’ comes in,” Lara said.
As a cryptologist, Lara was not a trained Navy SEAL but had to get to a proficiency level where he could feel safe working with the SEAL operators and “not hurt one of them or hurt myself.”
He said that he learned a lot of leadership lessons during that time.
“They’re all positive, but there were so many leadership lessons in that period of time that I always rely on to help me navigate future decisions,” Lara said.
Gallutia asked what type of leadership he learned in the military.
“Because the assumption that the military is command and control, very hierarchical,” Lara said, “you follow orders and only do what you’re told. But I’m telling you right now, it’s like anything else: the environment dictates basically how you approach things.”
Lara said you can plan all you want, but variables always arise, and you must be adaptable and agile.
Lara added that the transition from the military to business and then to the nonprofit world has been an interesting one.
“That was a huge eye opener, because I went from a predominantly male environment, just the regular military,” Lara said. “There’s about 13% that are female, and the rest are male, so it’s a very male-dominant environment, and it’s even fewer females in special operations.”
On the other hand, Lara said he’s now immersed in a nonprofit world that is primarily run and led by women.
“They’re my peers and my bosses, and also much younger,” he added. He noted that, in his experience, younger people are searching for what he called “authentic leadership.”
“Authentic leadership means that young people are craving authentic leadership. They’re driven just like you and I are.”
And while Lara believes young people want to succeed, he noted that “we all measure success differently. They want to have deep meaning, and they want to be known for having a unique conversation in this environment that I’ve never really had before.” Lara says that this has required him to “really activate my listening skills and learn what authentic leadership is and provide that in individual terms of a relationship.”
