Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of Unscripted Small Business. Today's Guest has over 20 years of experience as a business owner, keynote speaker and leadership expert, helping organizations develop high performing leaders. In this episode, Dr. Andy and I explore the essential qualities of effective leadership, including the key differences between managing and leading and the challenges new managers often face. We also dive into the changing employment landscape and the crucial need for employee retention. Dr. Andy also shares with us his four leadership necessities, conviction, competence, character and covenant. You'll hear Dr. Andy's insights on leadership development, hiring practices, team performance, and how to balance outcomes with the needs of your team members. He even shares valuable lessons from rescuing dogs, showing how personal connections and trust play a huge role in leadership. If you are looking to level up your leadership game, this conversation is packed with actionable insights. Let's get started.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: So wonderful having you in the studio today. Thank you so much for being here.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: My pleasure. I've been looking forward to our, our good discussion.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Awesome. So to start off with, I would love to just kind of hear from you. How did you get started with business? I know you have over 20 years of experience, but how did you get started?
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Well, I used to be a little bit embarrassed about the fact that I was not overly strategic. But then I just started talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs and small business owners and leaders. And like many, I kind of fell into really both halves of my life. As you know, I wear two different hats. I'm a leadership consultant. I travel and do workshops and keynotes. I've written a couple of books. I do coaching.
And then my wife and I also are multi unit, multi territory franchisees. We own five swim schools where last our staff did 200,000 swim lessons. We're saving kids lives here in the state of Texas, Central Texas, where I live, neither one of them were overly strategic or purposeful. They kind of happened to me, Abby, the leadership side of things.
I became a person of faith early on as a child and I'm reading these biographies of Jesus on this servant leader. And then some of the first jobs I had, they weren't even career jobs. This was like working construction. As I was going to college. I had some bad bosses and it was like this is the way they're supposed to be. This guy has an anger management issue and he's taking it out on his employees and cutting corners on his customers. And it awakened in me this frustration of it's just not supposed to be that way. And so as that grew, I just realized what, what really gets me up is People who are in positions of influence, using that position for themselves rather than for others. And so a passion was born. But I never sat down and said, man, I'm going to build a three year strategic plan and I'm going to employ the EOS model to grow my business and we're going to tackle these markets. I'm not that smart. It just was a passion that wouldn't go away and, and I'm a gifted communicator. So I started writing and talking and God kind of opened some pretty cool doors. And 5 million frequent flyer miles later, I've, I've traveled the globe challenging managers to become high performing leaders. That's a tagline on our website.
And so I'm, I'm passionate about that. And out of the passion really grew the consulting business.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: I can feel the passion for what you're saying as, as you're saying this, which is incredible because I think a lot of business owners do have passion for what they're doing. Talk us through what the difference is between a manager and a leader.
[00:03:56] Speaker C: So that's, that's the million dollar question. If you and I can figure that out, we, we could just launch this super successful business. I think the first thing we have to say is managers and leaders are not in opposition to each other. But if we had a simple definition, management is about activities.
Leadership is about the people that accomplish those activities.
Now having said that, they coincide any good manager, if they're truly a good manager, the people that work for them are going to say she's a good boss, he's a good leader.
The other thing I'd say kind of is foundational to your great question is I don't know if you ever really know if you've arrived as a great leader. Indeed, I would say if you get to the point where you think you've arrived as a great leader, you're missing one of the key leadership fundamentals, which is humble character, which is other orientedness. And so I do know there are things that help managers on the path to becoming high performing leaders. I call it the Ford Leadership necessities. A simple construct. Simple doesn't mean easy. But if managers are working on conviction, passion, energy, excitement, the very thing you just asked me about. If they're working on competence, helping their teams to execute better and better. If they are a person rich in character, fair minded, honest, other oriented, self sacrificial, if they're a person rich in character, and then if they engage in more than just a contractual obligation, if they engage in a Covenant with their people where there's both a formal responsibility, but there's also a personal relationship side as managers work at developing in those four leadership necessities. I can tell them, yes, confidently, you are on the path to becoming a high performing leader. Do any of us ever get there? Abby?
I think we're, you know, leadership is a series of commas. It is not a period.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and especially in today's market, I feel like a lot of companies are having retention problems with their employees. A lot of employees don't want to stay with their companies anymore.
[00:06:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Why do you think that is? What do you think that main reason is?
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. One, I don't think we've ever been really kind of richer in opportunities than we are today. The employment landscape is wide open. People aren't spending 40 years as a career corporate ladder person inside one company.
Those days are behind us. I think the second thing is social media, the online platforms, we all have access to LinkedIn, job search. I think not only is the ethos one of I'm not going to sell my soul to the company store, but I think the reality is I can always be looking for a better opportunity. And then I would say the third thing, Abby, this soft skill, my goodness, we call it a soft skill of leadership. It's probably the hardest skill of all.
But when it is done poorly, people leave. Stephen Covey, the guy who wrote the seven habits of highly effective people, like more than 25 years ago, I think he said it. People join organizations for the job. They leave because of their boss. And I think that's why the work that I do, I think is so vital in the SMB space. Because most of the people I work with are the people you work with. They're not the Harvard graduate, Wharton Business School sophisticates.
They're the person that started out kind of chucking a truck. And Today Chuck's got 12 trucks and 25 people and 50 subcontractors. And here she's not been formally trained. But they, they know my job is not just today to be a good plumber or a good electrician or a good software developer. My job today is be a good manager of people that can multiply my efforts.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. When you talk about managers, what do you think is something that they get wrong?
[00:08:13] Speaker C: You know, a lot of managers are promoted into their positions because they demonstrated competence in their prior position. I work a lot with sales teams and top performing salespeople often are promoted to become the regional manager or the territory manager. And the challenge with that is the very skills that made them a top performing salesperson. They could close business. They kept their eye on the ball, they were quota motivated. They knew they got to bring things in. By the end of the month and the end of the quarter, they were customer facing and they had warm, winsome personalities or they were hard drivers.
When you become the manager of a team, some of those very strengths actually get in your way because you've got to be able to let go of who you were to become who you need to be. I think that's one of the challenges managers struggle with, particularly the new promoted managers. What, what worked for them and made them successful is no longer necessarily what's going to make them successful. The whole goal is for you as a manager. Recognize my job now is to make other people successful, not me. And that's a, that's a, that's a tough challenge. In fact, I've worked with a number in the sales space. As I said, I've done a lot of work in sales space over the years. Some of the people that I have more respect for than anybody else are those sales managers who realize 18 months into the job, you know what, I'm just a better individual performer. I'm going to go back out into the field. That's what a sales team calls it.
And I understand why, because being a manager you give up control at times, you give up income potential because now you're trusting that they're going to be able to close business.
And so I think that giving up control and recognizing I've got to let other people do what I know how to do and they might only do it 85% as well as I will. But all of a sudden I've got seven people doing 85% of what I could instead of me doing 100%. There's a, there's a benefit to it, but it's hard at times.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: I hear what you're just saying about management and how that kind of coincides with leadership because you have to be selfless to be a good leader.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, well, and that's that, you know, the four leadership necessities, conviction, competence, character and covenant. That third one of character.
Abby, you know you and I told each other going to tell some stories tonight. I was in Australia working with a technology, a global technology firm doing some type of training workshop. It was a number of years ago now. I actually didn't remember what the content was about, but I've been done so many workshops over the years where it's kind of typical, the people that are in the workshop are sitting in front and their managers are in the back. And um. And indeed one of the managers of these couple of teams was sitting back there on, on their laptop and I honestly don't even. I. I don't know exactly what happened, but the person sitting next to him pointed at the laptop and laughed and gave him a hard time and other people looked and, and evidently he had been wasting company time on website stuff that he shouldn't be wasting time on. Here's my point, Abby. I didn't even know what was going on, but I saw the awareness of what was going on percolate through the rest of the room. And I will maintain to this day that person lost their ability to lead that day because people found their character lacking. I think the adage, you'll never be a better boss than you are a person.
I think it's foundational to understand what's the difference between a manager and a.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Absolutely. I want to talk more about these four principles. Can you give me an example of each one of these principles and kind of how, when you're coaching businesses, how do you start to incorporate these into creating leaders?
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Yeah. So one of the challenges with managers is they typically are in charge of something. An outcome, a project, an agile sprint for software development, a plant function that needs to be done when managers begin to see. Part of my job was to think further out. I need to get my eyes up. It's not just is the machine running correctly, it's what's the role of the machine integrated with the rest of the machines that are on the plant floor. And furthermore, they don't just get their eyes up, they get their eyes further out. In fact, how does our product compare to our competitors product and how can I be helping tweak things so they become more cost effective and efficient and new markets can we penetrate. How does the global interplay of economies impact my local SMB? Managers have to get their eyes up. That's that conviction piece. The truth of the matter is you and I might call it strategy or foresight. I just needed a C so that I'd have a nice acronym conviction. And indeed part of it is that whole passion piece where I'm at the front of the room when we're charging the enemy territory because I believe we've got a good product, we've got a good service, we can do it as well as anybody else. I'm passionate about that.
Now if I can take an Aside, while we're talking about that, I will. I'm wearing a T shirt today because I'm. I'm visiting one of the businesses that my wife and I own. We own swim schools, as you know, five retail swim schools. We did 200,000 swim lessons last year. I didn't, but my staff did. We've got about 100 people this time of year. It's in the winter when you're doing this recording with me. In the summer, we have almost double that many staff. It's an indoor, year round swimming environment.
Fifteen years ago, Abby, I was a high school swimmer, but I wasn't a very good high school swimmer. I was a lifeguard. But it's just kind of a cool job that you don't have to work real hard at. You get a nice can today. Unfortunately, I can tell you every single statistic around childhood drowning. In the state of Texas and nationally, I am passionate about kids getting safe in the water.
That passion grew. It wasn't on my radar. And so the thing that I love to communicate with emerging managers, there are some naturally passionate people. You went to Belmont University. My goodness. There's some musicians there that just, they bring fast into their voice and their instrument. But there are a lot of us that just say, you know what, I just want to do a good job. I've got something in front of me that I'm supposed to do. I want to do a good job. And the encouraging thing I want to say to some of your SMB folks that are doing that is, man, put your hand to the plow. Do work. Passion will grow.
There are some naturally passionate people. I'm not one of them, but I become passionate because I got involved in a worthy thing. And so that whole area of conviction, the reason it's the first leadership necessity is because all of the other necessities really are, are true for workers, for managers, for anybody. Getting your eyes up, believing in what you're doing, charging forward, seeing the bigger picture, that is a defining leadership characteristic. So one down, three to go. I'm talking at you a whole lot, though. Any questions or any illustrations from your perspective before we dive into leadership necessity number two?
[00:15:21] Speaker B: No, this is really fascinating, but I want to stay on this one for a second here. So when we talk about conviction and passion within leadership. I know a lot of managers, they might not ever admit this, but maybe they're just wanting to move up because they want the higher paycheck and they aren't really passionate about the business. How do you, as a small business Owner decide who is the perfect fit for that management role. And if you have someone that, let's say they've been with the company a long time, they know what they're doing, but they don't have that passion, is there something that you can do as a small business owner to kind of help invoke that passion?
[00:16:02] Speaker C: Great question. I think you and I would both agree, ultimately, passion's got to come from within. Are you doing the worthy work that you're excited about?
And I think also probably, to be real honest, you know, we'll talk a little bit later in our conversation about one of the defining characteristics of how do I know if that person is a leader? Well, if they're holding hard conversations with people, they're demonstrating their leadership muscle. There are times that I've just had that have a hard conversation with somebody they weren't getting the raise and promotion they desired because the game that they brought to the table was not the game we needed or it wasn't enough of the game that we needed. And so, you know, it's a tough thing because obviously you want to support your people and encourage them, but you also have a mission you're responsible to. You have a bottom line. You've got paychecks and so you've got to drive for excellence. And, you know, if you have a mid level manager who expects to be promoted simply because they've been there for two years, but they haven't demonstrated they're worthy of that promotion, you just have to be willing to have some tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth and ultimately recognize this person may leave because they're not getting promoted. But I have a bigger cause and I'm responsible to us. I've got it. You know, in my case, it's a privately held company. I got to go home and tell my wife, hey, we either wasted that money or we didn't waste that money. And you know, for the SMB space, it's very rarely are you responsible to Wall street, you know, stock stockholders, but you are responsible to your customers, your vendors and your family members that I'm making the hard decisions. And some of that is Abby has decided Andy's not going to get the race he wanted because he didn't really deserve it. It's a tough conversation.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So let's say that that happens and now you've got to hire somebody new that's not a part of your company currently. What are the types of questions that you're asking these candidates or certain qualities that you're looking for where when you're in that interview with that candidate, you just know that this person is going to have that conviction.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I know when we're onboarding people, we do some basic personality profiling. I use the disc assessment tool, my leadership practice. I'm licensed in using that tool, so I'm pretty comfortable with the insights it can provide. So we do personality profile, we do a skills assessment. Hey, we need somebody to do this. What have you done similar to that and what you've found in doing that? So we'll do that. We typically, if it's a person that's going to be in a management position, we have an interview with some of our other managers and let that be a key decision.
And then they're on really probation for the first 60 days. We don't know if they're going to want to work for us and we don't know if we're going to want them to work for us. Now, having said that, I've had a team underneath around me for more than seven years now, and I still don't get it right all the time. It's a crapshoot. The problem is, Abby, if you're going to hire me for a position, I'm going to show you my very best. The references I'm going to give you are going to think I'm a rock star. My resume is going to look like it was custom built for you. There's really no way that you can know until the twist is in themselves. I just made some horrible hiring decisions over the years. And I think, you know, part of that journey of leadership is all of us recognizing, you know what, Never get it. Summary right. Hopefully we're always learning that we're never in traumas. It's not a period.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's like dating almost, in a sense. They always say that you don't really know somebody until what is it, three to six months in. So it's kind of the same with employment as well.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. And in some respects that leads to that second of the four leadership necessities, because part of what you're looking for is this area of competence. But as we talked about earlier, it's no longer just your competencies and manager, it's can you make your team more efficient, more productive, more profitable? Are they better able to use their tools? In fact, are you fighting for them to get them the resources and the tools and the training they need to do their job effectively. If somebody is working at becoming a high performing leader and not just a manager, at times, they fight the fight uphill. Hey Abby, I know I work for you, but the team underneath me, I need you to do this for us because they're trying to scale this capability and we need funding or we need two more people or we need to change something we're doing and that, that effort to help those people become more competent execution of a good team. If a leader's got a team that is increasing their output, their capacity, their mission, that's one of those other leadership necessities. Are you doing a good job to competently helping your team to X out.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: What happens if a team is not meeting expectations and maybe they're not as competent? What are some tools that they can utilize to become more competent team players?
[00:21:30] Speaker C: You know, I think any, any business that's a sustainable business needs to have some KPIs, key performance indicators or metrics. They need a dashboard that somebody can look at and say are our production is up or our sales is down or our customer service scores are flat. We need to know where we're at. So first of all, we've got to have a measurement capability. And you know, some of the SMBs you and I work with at the, at the small end, the challenge for them is, well, I don't know, just you know, I've always been able, I could spell it in the wind if we're having a good year or not. And so there's some basic business disciplines. Are you operating on a budget? When you read a P and L, do you know what a balance sheet is? Do you understand your cash flow statement? There's some basic fundamentals that managers need to understand.
It's not just the owner's responsibility. I've got a P and L responsibility now as well, which means I need to understand inputs and outputs and I need to understand capitalization and CapEx versus OpEx. All these terms that I never thought I was going to need to understand, but, but now I do. And there, there needs to be measurements and metrics. How does my team qualify for bonus? There needs to be a very clear finish line to know if we made the score or not. And broadly, I think I alluded to customer service. Quote P and L statement, cash flow statement. Those are some of the things that will tell you if your team's doing a good job or not.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Yeah. How does this lead into the third circle?
[00:23:05] Speaker C: You know, your timing is just perfect. As I was thinking that the third C On the one hand, looks less tangent there because it's the leadership necessity of character. This whole reality that you'll never be a better leader than you are a person. Are you fair minded, are you honest, are you other oriented, are you sacrificial, are you doing anywhere? In fact, the leader that Jim Collins in his research 20 years ago in the book will be great, called a level five leader.
Well, your ability to that type of person directly impact their ability to perform because their trust in you grows, their loyalty to you grows your ability to fight on their behalf with unhappy clients and with senior management making the wrong decisions. That, that all is a reflection of your character. And so you show me a person who is rich in character even if they're at the entry point of their career. I would say that person's destined to be a good leader because they'll learn the other necessities because of who they are.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Character is so important. And I think that's a lot of times why employees will leave a company is because they don't like the management's character.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And that's what I saw in Australia that day so many years ago. There was something about that person that their team didn't like and it percolated through their leadership. Impact was minimized that day. And I would agree with you, I think, I think that's more true today perhaps than ever because of the cultural environment we live in where social media is pushing at us all day long images of the way it's supposed to be and that, you know, 1950s corporate icon kind of people.
They don't exist anymore. Right. It's you better like the work you do and you better like the people you work with or the team is not going to be the same team in three months. People are going to spin off and go do something else.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: And a lot of people are, you know, leaning more towards remote work these days as well. So the structure of, of management, I'm sure has changed a lot. What are kind of the trends with that that you've kind of noticed and how these components relate to, to that as well?
[00:25:39] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it's interesting because we're talking about leadership during our time together and there's some fundamental communication skills.
Everybody that aspires to be a leader needs to recognize that their title should be cco, Chief Communication Officer because that's their main job if they aspire to be a leader is communicating with their team and about their team and for their team. And so there's Some very fundamental things that a Chief communication officer needs to be in charge of. So if you're managing a team and you've, you've got remote meetings, you've got to have your camera on and you got to make sure you got a good microphone, just some basic fundamental things. You need good lighting and you need to learn how to make eye contact with the camera instead of the screen.
This sounds so elementary to me, but I work with so many managers where they say, yeah, I'm here, I'm just going to leave the camera off today, if it's all right. You're not allowed to do that. In fact, you're training your people to have their cameras on as well and you are the role model for that. So, you know that whole thing of executive presence.
The author of the book executive presence 25 years ago just talked about how important it is for leaders to do the things that give them visual permission to be in charge. And in a remote workforce, I think that means you got to get good on camera. Now, you know, I'm on this camera with, with somebody that obviously is very comfortable in front of the camera and you look great. I, you know, I'm in a coffee shop that doesn't have anything on the background and it's not a perfect setting, but that was the timing of things. And, and, and yet I, you know, I spend a little bit extra on my glasses so that I got the glare free lenses so the lights in front of me wouldn't distill my eyes. And, and I mean, there's just some basic fundamentals of, of doing that. I think the second thing if you're leading a team remotely is there's a movement on LinkedIn, you know, kind of death to meeting. We should have as few meetings as we possibly can.
I don't subscribe to that. I think leadership, because leadership is transferred in the corridors of communication. I think if you're leading a remote team, you probably need to touch base with them more often. You need to have slack set up or, or group meeting. You need to have a weekly teams call or a weekly zoom session.
They can be quicker meetings, they can be tighter meetings. But I think if you're expecting people to perform remotely, there needs to be an easy way for them to preferably stand by the water cooler virtually.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's about bringing in that humanism back to it. Because when we're wrapped up on our screens, we almost forget that we have a team and we're working with people on that team.
[00:28:34] Speaker C: Well, and if that Remote work is indeed remote home office work. I think the wonderful thing all of us discovered during the horrible tragedy in those early days in Covid is, man, I'm letting people see that I'm a dog rescuer, and the dogs are in the background on the daybed in this second bedroom. And all of a sudden, two other employees who are dog rescuers. We never really talked about it, but all of a sudden, we're fans of each other because we're dog rescuers. Maybe. I'll never forget the just this endearing conversation I had early into that post. Covid. We're all trying to figure out what kind of logitech cameras do we need and how do we set up our backgrounds. And.
And I was zooming with a woman who you could tell she was. She had boxes of cereal behind her on shelves, and, you know, we just ended up talking about this.
Her pantry. She had a very big pantry off her kitchen, she said. And because she had three kids at home and a spouse at home, this was like, the only quiet place in the whole house. She could open up her laptop. Well, that just humanized the interaction so much to know she was doing the best she could do. And we got to see her sitting in her pantry.
I think that's been one of the wonderful things about all of us learning to live remotely is people. You know, people care about people. And the fact that I've written several books, the only one that's become a little bestseller is on the lessons I've learned from my rescue dogs all of a sudden becomes real when I'm talking to clients and customers, because one of our recent rescues jumped up on their daybed behind me, and I'm working from my home office.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Tell us more about your book, your Amazon bestseller.
[00:30:22] Speaker C: Amazon bestseller. Well, as you know, Abby, because you sit in that world as well, Amazon bestseller doesn't mean I've made any money. It's. It's. It's really my. My publishing company that helped me with this book said, andy, we're gonna. We're gonna do a Kindle special, and we're gonna send it out to all of the rescue groups, and. And people are going to, you know, pay $1.99 for a Kindle copy. Oh, and by the way, if they have Kindle Prime, I think it's free for the next 30 days. So, you know, I had 10,000 downloads of the book relatively quickly. But as my wife reminds me regularly, Andy, you've spent thousands of dollars on that book, and you got one royalty check for $4.67. So. So being a best selling author doesn't mean you make any money. But having said that, I don't want to dismiss it too much.
I realized early on in my passion around leadership that my wife and I have been rescuing dogs and cats since early in our marriage. We've been married many years now. We've had a bunch of rescue animals. And some of the most powerful illustrations resonated with people, were not based on my dissertation studies. They were not based on my great reading of all of the current leadership lessons. They were recognizing it.
When a dog does a play bow with a new dog, what he's basically saying to this new dog is, I'm safe, I'm available, we can be friends. And just recognizing sometimes the best, the best message I can communicate to an employee is, I'm down. You love it. It's safe, we can be friends.
I'm not coming from above. I want to meet you. Eye to eye or recognizing. We had a particularly challenging dog that the way our house was set up, the doggy door went into the garage and then into the backyard. But if the garage door was open also, you could bolt out into the neighborhood. And I found myself for weeks and weeks yelling at Redford, no.
And then one of the wise pet trainers that I worked with over the years said, why don't you change that? And whenever you are pulling in and Redford is coming out, call him to yourself. Make it such a pleasant celebration that he runs toward you as you get out of the car instead of bolts out. A powerful yes is always better than a harsh no. Well, Abby, that's a dog lesson, but that's a life lesson, isn't it? I mean, you and I, if we're on our game as leaders, we're recognizing. Well, that's a truth that you can put in the bank with your team members.
So that was the book. It was actually a series of talks I gave. And at one point, this small publisher I mentioned a minute ago somehow was in the back of a room. Or he and I started talking and basically said, you got any other dog stories? And I said, man, I think most of what I've heard about leadership hasn't come from my dissertation or any of this other stuff. It's learning to lead rescued dogs who oftentimes come with issues. And he said, that'd make a great book. And so they're mainly been golden retrievers who rescued. Almost all the dogs we've rescued have been goldens or f. Golden.
Sell the book the Golden Principles because of golden and the Golden Rule. And so the golden principles, life and leadership, lessons from a rescued dog. And Abby, I think your listeners, even today, if they're a Kindle prime member, it's a free download. So. And this is kind of a Chicken Soup of the Soul book. Ten leadership principles. Two of them I just shared with you, get down to their level. A good yes is always better than a harsh no.
Things like that. So sweet, endearing book about the life of our pets.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: A good yes is always better than a harsh no. That is just a nugget of wisdom. I'm going to be taking that one.
[00:34:12] Speaker C: Isn't that right there? Yeah. I mean, I wish I could tell you that, but that wasn't mine, that was Redford and trying to get him running out into the neighborhood.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Very cool. So we can find the book on Amazon and as you said, the Kindle download is free. That's amazing.
[00:34:25] Speaker C: Yes, of course. And I've got another resource as we wrap our time up, I'd love to make available, but the fourth and final leadership necessity. So we've talked about conviction, we've talked about competence, we've talked about character. Now the fourth one I struggled with trying to define what I was seeing. I spent my life interviewing, working with, training, standing alongside good leaders, trying to figure out, in fact, if you look at some of my early stuff from like 10 years ago, I was calling the fourth necessity consistency. @ one point I called it consistent communication, this idea of chief communication officer. And then I realized about three years ago, here's what I see.
If you're the good leader that I think you are, you balance the tension between two things. They're the covenant things. Covenant's kind of an old fashioned word. Guy Richie brought it back into our formal language a couple years ago with a, you know, it's a brutal Guy Ritchie kind of movie, but a really good movie about a commitment that a soldier made.
Here in the state of Texas, where I live, if somebody's going to get married, obviously it's romantic love and affection forever and ever till death duels part and all of that personal side, if I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
There's also a formal document that's signed by an officiant and recorded with the county clerk. There's both a formal side and a personal side to this relationship. It's not a contract and it's not just, shall we move in together if we're going to get married? There's a formality to it that's called a marriage covenant. And when I realized the best leaders I'm observing, they hold their people to their formal outputs. We've got goals we have to meet. We've got KPIs that we're supposed to follow. We've got NPS scores that were responsible for growing. Whatever it is, we've got a mission in front of us to accomplish our accomplishment. And then also if you, if you poke behind the curtain a little bit, one of those team members needed an extra three weeks of PTO because their, their parent was moving into a memory care facility and they needed to shut the house down, be out of town for three weeks and take care of things when far beyond HR policy. But that leader made it happen. And it didn't get publicized. And it's not. It was just the right thing to do. And I realized that's what I see that the managers that are truly becoming high performing leaders, they have the ability to work at doing both of those.
Now this is one of those where once again, I'm not sure you ever get it right. It's a dynamic tension between one of my babies.
Too much about the outcome and when I'm being too much about my people, it's got to be a balance of both.
That's why I don't think leaders ever fully arrive. But you're managing the tension of covenant. I made a promise to my people. That promise was they're going to get paid for good work.
And that promise was I've got their back.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: So one of my final questions. What would you say to business owners who feel like they don't have the time or resources to invest in leadership development for their managers?
[00:37:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
First of all, I feel their pain. I run a $5 million.5 unit in three different territories retail business. And you and I are recording this on a Thursday evening. I have had a week of Bob the Gosling. I have. I've gone from one thing to another, never quite getting anything done and then realizing, oh, I've already disappointed three people because I didn't get back to them. That's. That's the life of an entrepreneur. That's a life of an SMB leader.
And part of what we've got to do is recognize we got to build in time to work on the business and not just in the business. That's not my language. You and I both heard that before.
Here's the way I try to do that. I call it my leader's hour. I'm a morning person like many of us are. And as Many mornings as I can, I try to get up early and get oriented through that day and that week. That involves in spiritual disciplines, that involves some reading and writing and also involves looking at my to do list and my calendar. It involves me looking out a little bit further than just my 8 o'clock meeting. Because I live in a retail world. When I'm wearing my aqua tots hat, the business day doesn't start till 9:00. So my 6:30 to 7:15 or 7:30 meters hour, I'm not missing any transactions at that point. But it sets me up for more success than I would have if I didn't have that meters out. I don't have it every day. Some days I hit the ground revenue and it's never perfect. But if we're going to become leaders and not just managers, it doesn't happen naturally. We have to decide how do I work on my business and not just in my business.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: Yeah, very well said. And I love that you have an hour devoted just to kind of get yourself ready for the day. Do you have any other self care tips for leaders?
[00:39:36] Speaker C: Well, so first of all make sure I understand. I call it the leader's hour. There are days when I have a full hour. There are other days when my leader's hour is 15 minutes because that's all I can watch. But it's that it's that time for myself.
And then I will tell you I'm a fitness nut, I'm a big crossfitter and I point toward the end of the day where I can go to the gym for an hour and in some respects shed a lot of the bop, the gopher frustration that has climbed all day long. I think my rhythm is different than a lot of entrepreneurs and SMBs. A lot of people I work with, they're at the gym at 5:30 in the morning and good for them, I'm a morning person. But I need that time to be ready for the day and the week in the month in front of me. So the other self care habit that I follow is I go to the gym at 5:30 or 6:00. There's a 6:30 class in our CrossFit gym and I'm one of the regulars at 6:30 class so that works. Now my family life, my wife is a consultant as well. Our daughter is grown and gone so. So the home responsibilities are pretty flexible so I can work that rhythm, you know. And then the other thing, obviously I think for both of us I'll just, I just need to eat well and drink well and I live in the state of Texas and Dr. Pepper is a national drink of the state of Texas. But I need to limit my Dr. Pepper intake and my, my Frito Lay's intake and you know, have a focus on high quality protein and veggies to give me the energy to be the leader. I need to be good sleep and good, good nutrition. So I think in all of these, so you know, I don't have any of them dialed down. We're all in process. And so I put all of my writing, I've been writing for about 12 years. I put all of my writing in my own CHAT GPT library early last year. And so now I have kind of my own ChatGPT universe. And my assistant recently and I did this interesting exercise. What are some common themes in all of Dr. Andy's writing? And this idea of we better be humble because we never quite get our act together was one of the things that popped up that's I think a true leader just realizes it's not even that self abasement humility. It's no, I'm in charge. I like being in charge. I like making decisions. I don't want to work for somebody else. This is my small business owner and I may be getting it wrong. So that balance of that willing to kind of laugh at yourself consuming as.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: Hard as you're sitting there, spoken like a true leader. Where can people go if they want to work with you? Whether that's for speaking engagement or coaching.
[00:42:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So Neely Leadership N E I L l I e neelyleadership.com will take them right to my website and, and yeah, I, I do speeches, I do workshops, I do a lot of writing.
There's a link at the top of my, my website if somebody just wants to grab 15 minutes and pick my brain and, and you can have an initial conversation. Man, that I'd be happy to. A number of years ago one of my business coaches says AMD pulls some of your good thinking together in just a simple tutorial. So I have a book, an eBook, an eight page eBook called the Three Imperative Leadership Conversations. You and I talked earlier about the need to hold a hard conversation. Leaders also need to be holding coaching conversations. So it's an ebook on holding a hard conversation, holding a coaching conversation and then how to hold a threefold affirmation conversation. So this ebook is available simply@leadership materials.com leadership materials.com and they can sign up for my blog at that point if they'd like to and get a copy of that. That simple eBook, the Three Imperative Leadership Conversations.
[00:43:31] Speaker B: Awesome. And I'll be sure to put that in the show notes, too, because I'm excited to read that book as well. That's wonderful.
[00:43:37] Speaker C: Very good. Well, my business coach said, the only problem with you, Andy, is there aren't going to be any good website addresses left anymore. We need to get some of your content out there, but find what you can. And. And I said, Austin, I got leadershipmaterials.com and we just bought it on GoDaddy. And he said, what a great name. So it's easy to remember. Leadershipmaterials.com Very cool.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: So I have two final questions for you. My first question is, leaders are constantly learning. So what books or resources are you utilizing right now?
[00:44:12] Speaker C: Yeah, but if you know, it's so interesting. I used to arrogantly brag. I read 52 books a year, and I was reading a book a week, and then I stopped. And part of the reason I realized I stopped is I'm blogging a lot of stuff and I'm listening to leadership podcasts because my faith is so important to me.
I read books by John Mark Palmer, a devotional writer who thinks a lot about this, and Andy Crouch, who's been a major magazine publisher whose faith is important to him. On my drive right now, I'm in a coffee shop halfway to one of our locations. I've been listening to a series of podcasts by the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. So that's really been that side of things. And then I keep coming back to some of the spirited old books.
I don't know how anybody that's serious about growing their small business can't read. You can't get by without reading a book that's 25 years old. The discipline of market leaders. It's just this. It's. It's. Yeah, I see you nodding. It's a. It's a book that's a required course in many mba, you know, courses. It just is kind of the foundational thing of how do you think about your business? The discipline of market leaders. In fact, it's so cute. I talk about the principles in that book so often that my retail managers finally just got me a T shirt. And they said, all right, all right, we know what you're going to do. We're at a meeting. Put the T shirt on again. Because there's a visual in this book that's a pretty simple but profound visual. And then anything by Patrick Lencioni is always good stuff. John Maxwell's got some great Leadership stuff. If your listeners haven't read the 21 irrefutable laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, they need to. It's just kind of the foundational book on leading and not just managing.
And then once again, I think if, if they access my my website about 3 months ago I put up my blog post was on the top 20 leadership books I would recommend so they can download that.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Incredible. We will definitely link that in the show notes as well. Dr. Andy, thank you so much for all of the resources and wisdom that you have shared today. I, I know I've learned so much from our conversation, so I'm so excited to hear just some of the takeaways that our listeners have had as well. So to wrap up the show, there's a question that I ask all of my guests and it's kind of like a Mad Libs question to fill in the blank. So you have to blank to blank.
[00:46:45] Speaker C: You have to blank to blank. I flunked Mad Libs when my young daughter and I would do it together on vacation.
Well, no, it really comes back to things that you and I have talked about for 45 minutes now. You have to be a good person. Tell them you'd be a good leader.
There might be short term success if you cut corners as a leader, but long term, you have to be a good person to be a good leader.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: I love that. Thank you so, so much for your time today. Dr. Andy, it has been an absolute pleasure.
[00:47:22] Speaker C: You bet. My privilege and good luck. What a great podcast you're putting out.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us today. I Hope you found Dr. Andy's insights as valuable as I did. From the four key leadership necessities to the importance of character communication and self care. There is so much to take away from this conversation. If you are looking to develop your leadership skills or transform the managers on your team, Dr. Andy's advice is a great place to start. Remember, leadership is a continuous journey and investing in yourself and your team is always worth it. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review. And if you want to connect with Dr. Andy or learn more about his work, check out the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you next time.
