“Take Care of Your People.” His Father Said It Three Times. Fifty Stories Later, It’s a Bestseller

Before he was Dr. Tom DePaoli — before the doctorate in management, before the Lean Six Sigma black belt, before the silver eagle of a United States Navy captain sat on his collar — he was a nervous young man about to be commissioned as an officer, and he did what nervous young men have always done. He asked his father, a Navy man himself, for advice.

His father did not hesitate. Take care of your people, he said. Then he said it again. Then he said it a third time. “Okay, Pop,” DePaoli remembers answering. “I get it.” He did not get it. Not then. It would take a full career — paper mills and naval air stations, purchasing floors and warehouse complexes, ten companies as an employee and fifty organizations as a consultant — before he understood that his father had not handed him a sentiment. He had handed him a method.

That method is now a book. Servant Leadership Stories: Stories on Building Trust, Radical Empathy, & Elite Teams is DePaoli’s fifteenth published work and an Amazon bestseller in leadership. It contains fifty short accounts of what it actually costs a leader to earn the trust of the people who do the work — and what it returns. “They’re true,” he says of the stories, with the flat certainty of a man who has spent a lifetime distrusting anything he could not verify. “None of them are made up. They’re all actual experience.”

The Ivory Tower Is the Enemy

Ask DePaoli what servant leadership means and he does not reach for a definition. He reaches for a location.

“Go where the work is done,” he says. It is the sentence the book keeps returning to, the way a hymn returns to its refrain. Not the conference room. Not the dashboard. The shop floor, the loading dock, the desk where the invoice actually gets keyed. “You can’t do that if you just sit in an office all day reading spreadsheets and reports. You’ve got to get out on the shop floor, or wherever the work is done, and find out what’s going on.”

The corollary is blunt, and he repeats it in the book with something close to irritation: don’t sit in the ivory tower. A leader who governs from a distance is not merely inefficient, in DePaoli’s reading. He is unarmed. “You can’t bluff people with bar charts and spreadsheets,” he says. “You have to have a really good feeling for how the work is actually done.” The moment a leader issues an order that is obviously not grounded in fact, the room knows. And the room never forgets.

What he is describing is the thing he calls street cred — an unglamorous, hard-currency form of authority that no title confers and no org chart can grant. It is earned only one way, and the way is inconvenient.

BY THE NUMBERS: THE MAKING OF A SERVANT LEADER

• 50 short, true stories — everyone drawn from an actual assignment, none invented
• 15 books published; Servant Leadership Stories is the fifteenth and, in his own estimate, among his best
• 30+ years in uniform — retired from the U.S. Navy as a Captain (O-6) in logistics
• 10 companies as an employee; 50 organizations as a consultant, across chemical, paper, pharmaceutical, automotive, IT, academic, and government sectors
• 8 professional certifications earned mid-career, including SPHR, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and C.P.M.
• 10 to 20 people — the size of the typical department he insists any leader can learn, job by job
• 60 to 80 hour weeks worked to cover one grieving employee’s desk while she buried her mother
• 1 rule beneath all of it, delivered three times by his father: take care of your people

Reverse Apprenticeship: The Idea Underneath Everything

In the book, DePaoli gives the practice a name: reverse apprenticeship. The leader becomes the student. He sits down with each person on the team, walks through the job as they do it, and — this is the part that separates the method from a listening tour — actually performs some of it.

Told that this sounds insurmountable, DePaoli does the arithmetic out loud. Most departments have ten to twenty people. Most organizations of any size already maintain ISO 9001 documentation or standard operating procedures, which means the job has been written down already, step by step, in the employee’s own words. “If they’ve already done that,” he says, “you go down, sit with them, walk through how they do the job, and it makes it much easier. Much, much easier.”

Three things happen. The leader earns respect, because he has done the work. The leader discovers the irritants — the small daily frictions management routinely ignores and the people doing the job cannot escape. And the leader acquires the one asset that cannot be faked: he now knows what is possible, what is not, and how long it takes.

“Some people, unfortunately, have too much pride to do that,” he says. “I didn’t know any better. I just said, well, let’s figure this out together.”

The Employee Who Believed the Job Was Hers

The story that best explains the book is one DePaoli tells without a trace of self-congratulation, which is precisely what makes it land.

He had just taken over a department. One of the employees was a woman who had worked there for twenty years and believed, not unreasonably, that the job should have been hers. She was resentful. She was resistant. She was cold to every initiative he proposed. He tried, and failed, to win her over.

Then her mother got sick. Really sick. DePaoli approved the leave, walked her through the family-leave paperwork, and told her to go. And while she was gone, he did something no one asked him to do and no policy required: he did her job and his own. For weeks. “My wife got so mad,” he says. “I was working sixty- to eighty-hour weeks.”

She came back expecting to find her desk buried — the punitive stack that greets almost every American worker who dares to have a personal crisis. There was nothing. It had all been done. She stood there and said the sentence that DePaoli has evidently carried for decades: I’ve been here for twenty years, and no one has ever done anything like that for me.

What follows is the part most leadership books would omit, because it is not sentimental. Having spent weeks inside her workflow, DePaoli had learned something concrete: her computer systems were terrible. He had tried to use them. So the two of them sat down together, wrote up a request, and got IT to fix them. She became, he says, his strongest employee — the one who volunteered for the hardest projects.

This is the mechanism the book is built to demonstrate. Empathy without proximity is a greeting card. Proximity produces knowledge; knowledge produces a repair; the repair is what people actually feel. “If you find a way to make one of your team’s jobs easier,” he says, “they tend to like you.”

THE SERVANT LEADER’S FIELD RULES

Radical Empathy, and the Gardener’s Job

The subtitle promises radical empathy, which in most business publishing is a phrase that means nothing. DePaoli means something operational by it. He means knowing, in specific terms, what the people around you are carrying — at work and outside it — and then acting on that knowledge in ways that cost you something.

He borrows an image for what leadership is supposed to feel like. “It’s sort of like you’re a gardener,” he says. “You’re trying to make the plants grow. You’re trying to make the people grow. You’re trying to encourage them.” He extends the analogy toward children and their dreams: praise builds capacity, and contempt destroys it, and the fastest way to ruin a child — or an employee — is to tell them they cannot learn.

There is a story in the book about a purchasing team he ordered to attend the early-morning production meetings. They objected, reasonably, to the hour. His joke to them has the dry economy of a man who has managed people for forty years: if they’re going to badmouth you and say how awful you are, at least they have to do it to your face. What actually happened was that his buyers learned the plant, and the plant learned his buyers, and problems that used to take weeks began resolving in a morning.

The proof he keeps closest is not a sales rank. It is a message he received from someone who once worked for him, who read the book, found himself in one of the stories, and wrote to say: it wasn’t until I left the company and had another leader, Tom, that I really appreciated what you did for me.

What Artificial Intelligence Cannot Learn From a Spreadsheet?

Asked what new challenge leaders must prepare for, DePaoli does not flinch from the obvious one. Artificial intelligence, he says, is a new adventure for everyone. The task is to understand it, to use the tools, and to do so without depreciating the people.

Then he says something that reframes the whole conversation, and it is entirely of a piece with everything else he believes. The AI, he points out, also has to understand how the work is actually done. A model trained on the tidy fiction of a process document will fail in the same way a leader trained on dashboards fails. “AI is very powerful,” he says, “but you have to learn how to ask the right questions.” And you cannot ask the right questions about a job you have never done.

It is, in the end, the same argument he has been making since his father made it to him: the ground truth lives where the work lives, and there are no shortcuts to it.

Why This Book Lands Right Now

American workplaces are running an enormous trust deficit — what the book’s own jacket copy calls the silent tax of lost trust, rising bureaucracy, and reduced innovation. Into that gap arrives a book that is conspicuously not a theory. It is fifty things that happened, told plainly, each one ending in a lesson a reader can execute on Monday.

DePaoli says the hardest part of writing it was memory and selection. “Remembering all the stories, because I’ve had such a long career, and I wanted to pick the best ones,” he says. “When I wrote the stories I wanted people to understand the lesson very quickly. Don’t make it too complicated.” What he was building, he admits, is the book that did not exist when he needed it. “I wish I had a book like this when I started out. I didn’t want other leaders to struggle as much as I did.”

He is already at work on what comes next: a fusion of storytelling and servant leadership, including a storyboarding tool for leaders who are not natural storytellers. The title is not finalized. The governing rule is. “You can’t make up stories or embellish them,” he says. “You have to keep them truthful.” People have to believe you before they will follow you, and the fastest way to be believed is to have been there.

Asked what legacy he wants, DePaoli offers no grand ambition. He would like leaders to understand servant leadership, and try it. “You’re never going to have a successful team,” he says, “if people don’t trust you.”

There is a version of this book that would have been a victory lap — fifteen books, a doctorate, a captain’s eagle, an Amazon bestseller. It isn’t that. It is a sixty-hour week worked quietly on behalf of an employee who did not like him, for a mother she was about to lose. It is a man telling you, at the end of a very long career, that the whole thing came down to five words his father would not stop repeating.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Tom DePaoli

Dr. Tom DePaoli is the author of Servant Leadership Stories: Stories on Building Trust, Radical Empathy, & Elite Teams, his fifteenth book. He is the CEO of Apollo Solutions, the consultancy he founded in 1995, and a longtime educator who has taught more than 200 courses. He retired from the United States Navy as a Captain (O-6) in logistics after more than three decades of service, including active duty following September 11. He holds a PhD in Management, an MBA from Notre Dame, and eight professional certifications, among them Senior Professional in Human Resources and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He has worked inside ten companies and consulted for fifty more. He is still, by his own description, learning other people’s jobs.

© 2026 USA Weekly · Servant Leadership Stories by Dr. Tom DePaoli is published by PublishaBook.co and available on Amazon.