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Learning Insights Radio: Clarissa Mitchell with US Bank

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Learning Insights
Learning Insights Radio: Clarissa Mitchell with US Bank
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Clarissa-MItchell-US-BankClarissa Mitchell is Assistant Vice-Present of Talent Management with US Bank. She has 21 years of Human Resources experience with expertise in Talent Management, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Leadership Development and Training.

Clarissa is passionate about helping people develop skills and business acumen needed to build rewarding careers.

Clarissa has worked for several Fortune 500 companies, U.S. Bank, Merck and Kimberly Clark and have served in the Army National Guard for 6 years.

She holds a Master of Science degree in Human Resources Management from Troy University and a B.A. in Psychology from University of South Carolina; where her passion for career development began, as she served as student peer advisor in the University’s career center for entire college career.

Her greatest accomplishments to date is being happily married to her high school sweetheart for 25 years and her 2 adorable children, who are both seniors this year – her daughter, a high school senior, her son, a senior in college (whom she coaches as career mom).

Her passion of career development is also evident in her volunteer activities – She is often seen volunteering at local high schools, teaching resume, interviewing, and business etiquette workshops, as well as judging Future Business Leaders of America local and regional competitions.

Her Faith centers her to walk in her purpose every day.

Connect with Clarissa on LinkedIn.

Leigh-Anne-Lankford-TrainingProsTrainingPros President Leigh Anne Lankford serves clients throughout all markets and manages the company’s team of Relationship Managers.

With her extensive background in the retail, finance, human resources, healthcare, and information technology industries, Leigh Anne has honed the skills that make her a true learning and development expert.

Her areas of greatest experience are in instructional systems design, performance consulting, and eLearning design.

Leigh Anne joined TrainingPros in 2007 as a consultant and later became a Relationship Manager for the Atlanta market before becoming President of TrainingPros in 2020.

Prior to joining the TrainingPros team, Leigh Anne worked for the Federal Reserve System, ADP, National Vision, and GE Capital. She is an active member of the Association for Talent Development.

Her extraordinary contributions to clients and consultants year after year make Leigh Anne a trusted business partner for TrainingPros clients, consultants, and Relationship Managers across the board.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:01] Broadcasting live from Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for Learning Insights. Featuring learning professionals, improving performance to drive business results.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Learning Insights. And this is going to be a good one. We’re going to kick it off with our good friend, the sponsor of this show from TrainingPros, Leigh Anne Lankford. Welcome, Leigh Anne.

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:00:25] Thank you, Lee. I’m happy to be talking to you again after so long.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:29] I know. It’s been a minute. Why don’t you update us about what’s going on at TrainingPros?

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:00:34] So, we stayed pretty busy throughout all this work from home mess. But, of course, we’ve been virtual for 23 years, so we didn’t have to change our working model at all. But we’ve gotten really busy with our clients who are trying to convert their classroom programs rapidly over to a virtual classroom. So, that’s something we’ve been helping a lot of people with. And also helping them get virtual producers in place. So, people who will be the person on the side producing the show, the classroom, while the facilitator is concentrating on the actual program of facilitation.

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:01:08] And then, the other thing that we’re starting to get really busy with is, with all of this going on, a lot of people have gotten behind on their work of converting e-learning that needed to be converted from Flash to HTML5. It’s not going to be supported up to the end of this year, so there’s a hard deadline. But a lot of people have realized they’re going to miss at this point. And we’re getting busy doing that for folks as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:36] Do you think that moving into next year that some of this transition into remote is going to be more permanent and that that’s just going to be from new normal to just normal?

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:01:49] Yes, I do. I think that we’ve now all accepted that this is now the norm. I think a lot of people probably do miss the office. So, there might be like a common certain days kind of thing. But a lot of people are very happy with the work from home now and maybe staying for good. I read something the other day which kind of took me by pause, but, of course, I don’t have school-aged kids anymore, but they said that this could be the end of snow days forever.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:17] That’s true now for lot of folks.

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:02:20] I know. I mean, that’s like a rite of passage. That’s not a thing that you just look back fondly on. But you know what? They’re right. They could just all go virtual that day.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:30] So, now, in your customers that have made the transition or are making the transition, are you helping them get a handle on how to execute it today, but also to lay the groundwork so they can choose to do this if they want to moving forward?

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:02:45] Yes. So, we’re helping them more with how they deliver their training and provide that to people virtually. But, yeah, we are working with them on how to do it on an ongoing basis on their own. We’ve put together classes for their facilitators and their designers on how to turn your classroom program into virtual, how to design for virtual that kind of stuff. So, we’ve been doing that kind of work with clients as well. Teach them how to do it themselves at some point. So, it’s a fun time.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:13] Well, we appreciate your involvement in this show, Learning Insights. And we’re excited to talk to the guest you brought. Who’d you bring today?

Leigh Anne Lankford : [00:03:20] Well, I brought a long term friend and colleague, Clarissa Mitchell. She is the AVP of Talent Management at a financial institution. And we have been friends, probably, 12, 13 years, I’d say. And it’s just an honor to have her join us. She works heavily in talent management, talent development. I think her current role is a little more talent management, but she works with a lot of the HR side of the training field.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:51] Welcome to the show, Clarissa.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:03:53] Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Good morning. And it’s Friday and it’s coming up to a holiday weekend, so everybody should be very happy.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:02] Exactly. Well, before we get too far into things, can you kind of give us a definition of what talent management is?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:04:09] Yes. I hear that question a lot. Talent management, in its simplest form, is really the process of managing the most important asset that any company has. And you’ve heard this said, probably, many times before. But the greatest asset is people. So, talent management is managing people. It can go from a lot of different umbrellas. Talent management, depending on who you speak with, can be getting the right person on board hiring. You hear that called more talent acquisition. Then, it can be how Leigh Ann just said, about I’ve been in talent development. Training and teaching people new skills, that’s a part of talent management.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:04:57] And then, you also hear the measuring performance based on the employees. What they did during the year, based on your objective, can be managing performance, measuring performance. And then, you have the talent management. What I would say the true form that I have been in for the last eight years. And that is the process of identifying employees who have the potential to be the company’s strategic objective. What are the plans moving forward? So, identifying those employees who can actually do that, move that company forward, and what they have to do. And that is what I have been in for the last eight years, is identifying those individuals and making sure that we retain them because we don’t want them to go through a very high potential. They have the skills and they have the potential to go to other places, so we want to make sure, one, not only are we identifying them, know who they are, and developing them. But we also want them to stay.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:08] Now, when you’re identifying a high potential, are there breadcrumbs even prior to them being hired that you know that, “Okay. Let’s keep an eye on this person.” Or is it something that reveals itself after they’ve been with the company for a little bit?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:06:22] Well, because talent management, like I said, the first process is getting the right person in to the job. Making sure that we are doing a good job at our job descriptions and how we develop our job descriptions and put that out there. So, there can be biases that creep up in the job description, we can talk about that.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:06:47] But with the talent management of this, let’s talk about the people that are already at the company. We want to make sure that we do a great job in defining the competencies that are needed for the job at hand. And if we do that correctly, are going to be able to, when we are doing, what we call, talent review in assessing our individuals looking at, not only their performance, but also looking at their potential, because that’s where it is. It’s the potential to do the job as well. We want to make sure that we are basing our assessment on the competencies that we have identified and making sure that every one, regardless of their race, or their gender, or their age, every employee is looked at through the same. And we call it the same DEI lense, the same diversity, equity, inclusion lens. And that comes about starting with even the job description. And so, now, looking at the competencies and making sure that people are measured the same way.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:09] It sounds like a noble goal. Is there kind of systems you can put in place to eliminate bias? Or is this just a human thing that everybody has a bias, and a lot of times they don’t even know they have a bias.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:08:23] No. Oh, my gosh. That is a very loaded question. Yes, they are, what we call, unconscious biases that people don’t know that they even have. And, especially, in this current environment, it has been teaching me a lot. Many people are now having those conversations that it was like you wouldn’t talk about race at work. You didn’t talk about religion at work. There are certain things. I’ve always been told a lot. But I’m trained for about 21 years now. I’ve always been told you do not speak about certain things. So, now this environment has opened up those conversations for us to speak of.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:09:09] And like you said, one of those things that we want to make sure in the talent process that we are reducing is bias, unconscious bias. And what that is, is those opinions of, maybe, about employees when you are evaluating them – first of all, when you’re hiring them, they can take on many forms. And we want to make sure that we reduce some of those. And I’ll give you an example. One of the forms that bias can take on in the assessment process is the way a manager thinks or describes their employees. For instance, if you’re talking about women or professionals of color, the words could be aggressive or angry. However, when you are describing a man, you may describe that person as assertive. So, there is a little, we call it, code word. And you’re unconscious about that. But that’s where a lot of training comes in.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:10:26] I’ll give you another example. Women, people of color, or unrepresentative groups are more likely to be characterized the same when we’re going through the talent review process. They’re not quite ready. But they’re saying that for that group. However, for a man, many times they’re promoted on their potential, not necessarily their skills. So, in one group, you’re saying they’re not quite ready because, maybe, they don’t have all of the skills they needed. So, they are forced to prove their skills over and over and over again. Whereas, a man, you will say things and they have the potential to do it. They may not have done it yet, but I can see the potential in them.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:11:19] So, again, those are unbiased ways that they speak about our employees when we’re going through, not only the talent review process – of course, that’s where I’m most focused on – but even when we are in the hiring process and how we are speaking and describing someone.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:38] Do we have to do like The Voice? Do we have to have, like, kind of the chairs turned and judge each person just for the skill or the talent that you need?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:11:50] Yes. That is right. When we are going through the talent review process, we want to make sure that we are basing our assessments on the competencies that they need and what people have done over the last two to three years. So, one month in time does not do it. We need to look at performance over two to three years. We also need to look at the potential that you see in that person, that they have skills that they have, maybe, have done already. But, also, those skills can be developed to have the potential to move the company forward.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:12:34] And a lot of times what we see in our talent review process, again, going back to they’re not quite ready yet when we’re talking about women professionals of color versus when we’re talking about a man, “Oh, he has the potential to do X, Y, and Z.” So, a lot of that comes with training, you know, diversity training. Many people are doing a lot of that now. But we have to get past not just the training of looking at your unconscious bias, because a lot of times diversity training is used to avoid the lawsuits and to ensure political correctness or making sure that employees are not being harassed. But we need to go further into diversity training and focus on making sure that all of the processes that we’re doing in talent development and our recruiting goes deeper to train people on those unconscious biases that come up in all of the different processes that we have.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:46] Now, have you been able to develop, maybe, best practices or systems that help eliminate bias in this talent management process?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:13:53] Yes. We’re doing our best to do exactly that. We’re looking at the talent assessment personnel. I’ll talk about three different things. We’re looking at the talent assessment when we are assessing those individuals and making sure that we’re identifying those people with potential to move our company forward. I’ll talk about succession planning, and that is the formal process to identify those candidates for specific roles that we need to move us forward. And making sure that everyone in the company, if we have a critical role, that we have a successor to fill that role. And then, we want to talk about talent development, which, of course, is making sure that people have the opportunity to develop into what they need to. We are giving them the skills upskilling. That’s the new word, we’re upskilling.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:14:49] So, in the first one, I’m looking at talent assessment. We look at our evaluation process for biases. We want to make sure that we’re consistently looking at performance expectations across all employees. We want to make sure that you’re not being more lenient on one employee than others. So, that is the first thing, is going through our evaluation process and making sure that we can take out bias from there. When we’re looking at potential, for instance, we want to make sure that all of our employees have the opportunity to develop. They’re having the development opportunities that they need.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:15:31] And then, we’re going to look at succession. Let me go back and say one more thing on the assessment. Not only that we have found that the managers need to assess, but we want to bring in other people that have worked with that employee so we can get a holistic view, not just the manager’s view. But, you know, that employee may work on different projects during the year. And we want to make sure that other people are weighing in on that assessment to make it fair.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:16:07] And then, the second part of that is looking at our formal process of how do we choose successors for your critical role and making sure that we are going back to looking at the competencies that is needed for that role. And, hopefully, we have defined those and the job description, what is needed. And then, we’re looking at our candidate. Who are those candidates who have those competencies that we need, who have the potential that we need. And so, making sure that when you’re choosing a successor, that you’re not choosing people that are looking just like you, but you’re looking across your entire employee set in the succession planning.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:16:56] And then, the third part of that is looking at development opportunities. Are we giving all of our employees the same land of development? Do they have the same opportunities? Are they getting, what we call, those stretch assignments, those projects? Are they getting the visibility to be in front of senior leaders, et cetera, with that? And my organization looks at all three of those. How we are assessing the talent, how are we choosing our successors going forward, and how are we developing people to get to the next level and making sure that we can take out bias at all of those levels.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:44] Well, it sounds like when you’re bringing this to people’s attention and make them aware of it, then this type of training is something that not only can impact that organization, but it’s something that can kind of spread throughout the community and into the real world, because this is the skills that everybody needs, right? That could stem some of the social unrest we’re having now?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:18:07] Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve learned so much in the last couple of months. If people take a step back and be willing, so the willingness to reach across and understand what people are going through. That just because it doesn’t affect you, that moment in time does not affect you, does not mean that it’s not a problem. And we need to be more sensitive to that. And a lot of that comes with education and just not knowing and embracing that I don’t know. It’s okay that you don’t know, but it’s the willingness that you want to know. I think that’s really the difference. It’s okay. You don’t have to know everything. None of us knows everything. But it’s the willingness to want to know and learn more.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:04] Right. I find that people, you know, when they, as an individual, do something, they’re quick to forgive themselves. But when someone else might do a similar behavior towards them than they are, there’s less grace. And, you know, kind of opening their mind and giving a person that kind of a holistic view of what they’re doing and how they’re being seen. I think, maybe, you need to open their mind to have more empathy.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:19:33] Absolutely. And I love your word that you just say grace. We all need more of that, because that is what we have been given. So, it is for us to pay that forward of grace because we all are humans and we’re all walking. We’re in this together. We’re all on a journey. And so, if everybody can remember that, then I believe – and I try not to be Pollyanna – but the world could be a better place with the sensitivity and making sure that we give people grace.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:06] Now, in your career, you’ve been doing this for a minute, can you kind of look into the future? Or do you think we’re making progress at a fast enough speed? I’m sure things are better today than they were, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But is it something that’s accelerating that we’re going to really see a noticeable change in the next five to ten years?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:20:28] I will say my first word that comes to mind is encouraged. I am encouraged. I have been very encouraged, one, by the organization I work for. But I have been encouraged to hear, to be in conversations with individuals that things are changing in their organization. The first change that we needed is that people of color are feeling that they are not invisible anymore. That people are aware of some of the struggles that they have had, not just in the community, but also in the workplace. That they can talk about that now. And I think that the first thing is having those conversations as encouraged.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:21:20] I sit on one of my boards in Consumer Banking Association, and I hear across several different financial institutions of people having those conversations. And I see it, of course, on our social media. And that’s the first thing, is people are having those conversations and being aware. And, also, the part that is really making a difference is being aware of those struggles. The differences that people have had to go through in order to get to the same place, probably, that your men have had to go through. And that’s a good encouraging conversation. It’s like what are those barriers that are different?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:22:09] So, we’re not trying to fix anyone because people are already there. They’re their own person. We’re not trying to fix anyone. What we’re trying to do is eliminate some of the barriers, the additional hurdles that, maybe, women and people of color and underrepresented groups have had to go through over the years in order to get to the same place. It’s what I said earlier about in the assessment, hearing the words. Now, it’s more sensitive to me. Hearing the words when people say managers, maybe, characterize someone as they’re not quite ready yet. Well, what does that exactly mean? And then, describing a male is like he has the potential. So, I think we’re having those conversation and I’m very encouraged by that, that things will change.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:03] And then, this kind of work is not just kind of a feel good virtue signalling kind of work. There’s research that says that diverse and inclusive organizations have better performance, right? This can be tied to an ROI?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:23:19] Oh, yes. Many research that have pointed to saying that, “Hey, yes.” If you have a diverse workforce that your ROI has increased. And that is because you are having people to sit at the table. McKinsey, I say, they’ve always been one of the ones that’s been in the lead of showing people that the conference for Harvard Business Review, Diversity, Inc., there are multiple studies that will show you that having a diverse, not just a workforce, but having diversity in our leadership.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:24:02] Because I have found that corporate America, we don’t have any problems or issues with hiring women, and people of color, underrepresented groups. We don’t have that. What we are seeing is that at the top level, the leaders, that is where we need to see more representation and how do we get there. So, that’s where that conversation comes in, is what are those hurdles that are hindering those individuals from rising to leadership levels? Because you see many companies will say, “We are very diverse.” And they are. If you really look across and you count the numbers, they are diverse. They’re different. They are being inclusive.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:24:54] Lee, when I say the I in DEI, the diversity, the I is inclusive. They’re having the business resource groups. And some people call them the employee resource groups. To make sure that we’re including people and people have a safe environment. What is missing? I’m so encouraged that many companies are now embracing is the word equity. And so, it’s the D-diversity, E-equity, and I for inclusion. People are now embracing equity. Are we being equitable across our organization? Is equal across our organization and making sure that we eliminate those biases and those hurdles that people can rise to those leadership and executive levels?

Lee Kantor: [00:25:47] Well, it’s an important cause. And we appreciate your work in this field in helping kind of educate people about kind of doing that and removing these biases. Are you bullish about this or do you feel like we’re almost there? It sounds like, like you said, there was a time where they weren’t having diverse workforces at all. So, it sounds like we’re past that now. And now, we just got to make it more equitable up and down the org chart, not just in certain areas.

Clrissa Mitchell: [00:26:19] Yes. Exactly. We need to make it equitable across the org chart. We really do. And I’m very encouraged. I do a lot of work with our DEI. We’re looking at our career development programs. We’re looking at our mentoring programs and making sure – that’s one thing I didn’t say. But one thing that we have found through research, and even in our internal research, is making sure that those individuals, women or people of color, have mentors and have sponsors. And there’s a difference. The mentor is for those individuals who can teach you and show you things that you need to do in your career. It helps you build your skills, help you build those competencies and your confidence. That’s a mentor.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:27:18] But going a step further than that is a sponsor. And that’s usually a leader in the organization that really can take someone by, for lack of a better word, the hand and help them to move their career through the organization. And we have found that, one, we want to make sure that we are assigning mentors that people need to go out and get mentors. It’s very impactful. And there’s been studies that show that those individuals with mentors do better or stay with the organization longer.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:28:00] But let’s take it a step further and identify sponsors for those individuals that we have identified as having high potential or having the potential to move the company forward and making sure that they have the visibility that they need. So, those are one of some of the hurdles that individuals have had to go through in our people of color or women that we want to now reduce. So, I’m encouraged by that.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:28:30] Again, I always go back to that where I’m very encouraged about the conversations that we’re having and the things that we are doing. Not just having a conversation, but the processes we are putting in place. That is where the rubber meets the road.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:44] Right. And sponsorship is also where the rubber hits the road because somebody is risking political capital and holding somebody up and saying, this is your person. So, that takes us to another level. When somebody does that, then change can really occur faster.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:29:02] Yes. I agree. That is true.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:05] So, now, if somebody wanted to get a hold of you and connect with you, is LinkedIn the best way to do that, Clarissa?

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:29:11] Yes. LinkedIn is the best way to do that. I make sure that I updated my email address. And I am usually on it all the time. And yes, I would love for people to reach out if they want any additional information. I really appreciate the opportunity to share my insights on this. This is a very passionate, I would say, journey for me being an African-American woman in the workplace. And I find it as my mission that my purpose is to – I love developing people. And I’ve been in training, development, talent development for 21 years. But now in the last eight years, focusing directly on talent management and diversity. I really believe this is my purpose, to help people to not only develop, but to get those opportunities and make sure that we have equity in our entire organization.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:17] Well, Clarissa, thank you so much for sharing your story today. We appreciate what you’re doing and you’re making a difference.

Clarissa Mitchell: [00:30:24] Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Have a great weekend.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:28] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Learning Insights. And remember, we could not be sharing these stories without the support of our sponsor at TrainingPros.

[00:30:48] [Music playing]

About Training Pros

Since TrainingPros was founded in 1997, they have been dedicated to helping their clients find the right consultant for their projects.

23 years later, they are proud to have helped hundreds of clients complete their projects and thousands of consultants find great assignments. Training Pros continues to focus on helping their clients and consultants as well as their community.

Follow Training Pros on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Tim Sheehan with Greenlight

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Atlanta Business Radio
Tim Sheehan with Greenlight
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OnPay-Banner

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Tim-Sheehan-GreenlightTim Sheehan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Greenlight. Greenlight is the safest way for parents to give their kids money, approve their spending, and prepare them for financial independence.

Prior to Greenlight, Tim was the Lead Entrepreneur In Residence at Georgia Tech’s startup incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center. Earlier in Tim’s career he was Director of Yahoo! Finance and responsible for growing it to the #1 finance site in the world.

Tim also served as SVP Products, Marketing and Strategy for Biller Solutions at Fiserv, was a Cofounder & CEO of Reachable, General Manager of Yodlee, and Senior Product Manager at E*Trade.

Follow Greenlight on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode 

  • About Greenlight
  • Why it’s important to teach kids about money and saving money
  • Greenlight’s growth
  • About Greenlight’s brand refresh
  • How Greenlight has been able to succeed during the pandemic
  • What’s next for Greenlight

About Our Sponsor

OnPay’sOnPay-Dots payroll services and HR software give you more time to focus on what’s most important. Rated “Excellent” by PC Magazine, we make it easy to pay employees fast, we automate all payroll taxes, and we even keep all your HR and benefits organized and compliant.

Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.

Follow OnPay on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Passion for Fashion with Dayna Mance and Prism Boutique E17

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Phoenix Business Radio
Passion for Fashion with Dayna Mance and Prism Boutique E17
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Passion for Fashion with Dayna Mance and Prism Boutique E17

If you have a passion for fashion, or you just want to hear from a fierce female business leader, you will not want to miss this episode. Dayna has an infectious passion for fashion, but her true passion is in helping to elevate other female brands and artists while building Prism.

Tune in to hear how they used Covid to focus on the future of the business and how they have and will emerge stronger because of it.

Prism Boutique is a globally recognized brand with an eclectic and inclusive community of brands, artists and customers. Fresh, hand-picked clothing, accessories and home goods- locally made and from across the globe. With a boutique in Long Beach, CA and a growing online shop, Prism Boutique has emerged as a leader in the small business retail world.

Seeking out undiscovered makers, working with designers they love, and standing behind brands they believe in, as well as supporting other women in business, is crucial to Prism’s brand and mission.

Danya-Mance-Prism-BoutiqueThrowing caution to the wind — and leaving a 10-year corporate career with URBN Inc. — Dayna Mance opened Prism Boutique in 2013 on a sleepy Long Beach street.

Flash forward to two remodels, two kids, a team of nearly dozen women who power day-to-day operations, and today Prism is what Dayna always knew it to be: a living inspiration board for all the things she loves.

It’s been Dayna’s unwavering vision and commitment to our mission of supporting other small, predominantly women-owned brands, artists and makers and connecting them to our community that has made Prism the success that it is.

Follow Prism Boutique on Instagram.

About the Show

Tycoons of Small Biz spotlights the true backbone of the American economy, the true tycoons of business in America… the owners, founders and CEO’s of small businesses. Join hosts,  Austin L Peterson, Landon Mance and the featured tycoons LIVE every Tuesday at 1 pm, right here on Business RadioX and your favorite podcast platform.

About Your Hosts

Autsin-Peterson-on-Phoenix-Business-RadioXAustin Peterson is a Comprehensive Financial Planner and owner of Backbone Financial in Scottsdale, AZ. Austin is a registered rep and investment advisor representative with Lincoln Financial Advisors. Prior to joining Lincoln Financial Advisors, Austin worked in a variety of roles in the financial services industry.

He began his career in financial services in the year 2000 as a personal financial advisor with Independent Capital Management in Santa Ana, CA. Austin then joined Pacific Life Insurance Company as an internal wholesaler for their variable annuity and mutual fund products. After Pacific Life, Austin formed his own financial planning company in Southern California that he built and ran for 6 years and eventually sold when he moved his family to Salt Lake City to pursue his MBA. After he completed his MBA, Austin joined Crump Life Insurance where he filled a couple of different sales roles and eventually a management role throughout the five years he was with Crump. Most recently before joining Lincoln Financial Advisors in February 2015, Austin spent 2 years as a life insurance field wholesaler with Symetra Life Insurance Company. Austin is a Certified Financial Planner Professional and Chartered Life Underwriter.

Austin and his wife of 21 years, Robin, have two children, AJ (19) and Ella (16) and they reside in Gilbert, Arizona. He is a graduate of California State University, Fullerton with a Bachelor of Arts in French and of Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management with a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in sales and entrepreneurship.

Connect with Austin on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

LandonHeadshot01Landon Mance is a Financial Planner and founder of YourFuture Planning Partners out of Las Vegas, Nevada. His firm came to life in 2020 after operating as Mance Wealth Management since 2015 when Landon broke off from a major bank and started his own “shop.”

Landon comes from a family of successful entrepreneurs and has a passion and excitement for serving the business community. This passion is what brought about the growth of YourFuture Planning Partners to help business owners and their families. At YourFuture, we believe small business owners’ personal and business goals are intertwined, so we work with our clients to design a financial plan to support all aspects of their lives.

In 2019, Landon obtained the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) designation through the Exit Planning Institute. With this certification, YourFuture Planning Partners assists business owners through an ownership transition while focusing on a positive outcome for their employees and meeting the business owner’s goals. Landon is also a member of the Business Intelligence Institute (BII) which is a collaborative group that shares tools, resources and personnel, and offers advanced level training and technical support to specifically serve business owners. Your-Future-Planning-Partners-logo

Landon enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife, stepson, and new baby twins. He grew up in sunny San Diego and loves visiting his family, playing a round of golf with friends, and many other outdoor activities. Landon tries make a difference in the lives of children in Las Vegas as a part of the leadership team for a local non-profit. He regularly visits the children that we work with to remind himself of why it’s so important to, “be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

Landon received his B.S. from California State University Long Beach in business marketing and gets the rest of his education through the school of hard knocks via his business owner clients.

Connect with Landon on LinkedIn.

About The Tycoons of Small Biz Sponsor

Whether you’re an established local company, or a brand new start-up, you can count on GBS to be a part of your family.

We’re not just any benefits consulting firm, we’re GBS. We have nearly 30 years of experience in group benefits, a strong sense of purpose and it shows.

Austin L. Peterson and Landon Mance are registered representatives of Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp.

 Securities and investment advisory services offered through Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp., a broker-dealer (member SIPC) and registered investment advisor.  Insurance offered through Lincoln Marketing and Insurance Agency, LLC and Lincoln Associates Insurance Agency, Inc. and other fine companies.
 
Backbone Financial and Mance Wealth Management are marketing names for business conducted through Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. CRN-3077907-050720

Customer Experience Radio Welcomes Leadership Coach and Author Jason Young

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Jason-Young
Customer Experience Radio
Customer Experience Radio Welcomes Leadership Coach and Author Jason Young
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Customer-Experience-Radio

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Jason-YoungJason Young helps organizations create remarkable customer experiences and grow their leaders. He is the author of four books and creator of the Saturday Rundown, a resource delivered to your inbox with helpful ideas on hospitality and leadership.

Jason has worked with Chick-fil-A, Ford Motor Company, North Point Ministries, Life Church and many others. Learn more at jasonyounglive.com.

Connect with Jason on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:01] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, it’s time for Customer Experience Radio brought to you by Heineck & Company, real estate advisors specialized in corporate relocation. Now, here’s your host, Jill Heineck.

Jill Heineck: [00:00:19] Welcome to this very special edition of Customer Experience Radio. I’m your host, Jill Heineck. And I’m a business owner, real estate adviser, and customer experience enthusiast. As most of you know, I run a boutique real estate group specializing in relocation. And I have an obsession with continually improving the customer experience. We ask our clients at the beginning, during, and post transaction what it is they need from us in order to make it a 10 plus experience. Sometimes they know and sometimes they don’t. So, it’s up to us to anticipate their needs to create loyal repeat clients.

Jill Heineck: [00:00:55] This is why I’m excited about our guest today. He’s been helping organizations create remarkable customer experiences and grow their leaders. Jason Young is a hospitality and leadership communicator and coach, who has worked with leaders at companies like Ford Motor Company, Life Church, Chick-fil-A and others. And most recently, he was the Director of Guest Experience at Buckhead Church and North Point Ministries, a nationally known network of churches with 40,000 people in an average weekly attendance. And for those of you who aren’t familiar, Buckhead Church was founded by and is led by pastor, author, and speaker Andy Stanley. Jason is the author of four books, including The Comeback Effect, which focuses on how hospitality can compel guests to return to a church or business. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Young: [00:01:46] Hey, thank you, Jill. Good to be here.

Jill Heineck: [00:01:49] I’m so glad to have you. And I mean, you are speaking my speak here. I love talking about this. And I love to see the kind of work that you’re doing. So, let’s start with what gets you pumped about CX or the customer experience?

Jason Young: [00:02:04] I would probably say two things. One, the individual delivering the experience. And so, what does that mean for them? So, I don’t need you to do, like, all these tasks, which are important. But I want to help you feel something at work. Because if I can get you to do that, it’s much easier to, secondly, focus on the emotions of the guests. So, I love to help the team member feel it, deliver it, and then all of the guests to feel it and receive it, and then comment to somebody about their experience with that particular brand.

Jill Heineck: [00:02:40] I love it. So, what brought you down the CX road? How did you get here? What was your initial journey?

Jason Young: [00:02:47] It was not intentional. I will tell you that. If you were to ask – so, I would probably say two or three things. One, my parents are really good at this. So, my mom has worked in medicine my whole life. The way she cares for patients, and the way I heard her talk about patients, and how she wants them to feel, and removing obstacles, I didn’t know that growing up. It was forming this thing in my brain that was really important. My dad, the same thing – he used to manage a Fortune 500 company – that the way he would take care of people and talk about the guests and customers. So, I begin to put all these things together.

Jason Young: [00:03:30] The other thing is, so my background, most of it where I’ve worked has been in churches, and so coached and consulted with companies. What’s interesting about that is, the level of expectation or pressure is even more because it’s just a different place in a business. You know, the transactions are different. The bottom line is different. I mean, it’s still a business but it’s different. And so, I think in working in those places, I begin to understand how important people were, and the needs that they had, and the feelings that they had. And if we don’t acknowledge that, I could sell you something but that’s really, maybe, not what you need. You need something more. And so, I think kind of putting all those pieces together.

Jason Young: [00:04:18] My mom will tell you since I was a kid, I would always comment on experiences and the way they think and feel and treat. So, I don’t even know what I was doing. I probably still don’t. But nevertheless, I think it kind of brought me to this place that it is so important for me, personally, that I wanted to get into the space to help other people feel it and love it personally too.

Jill Heineck: [00:04:46] I love that. So, before you’re at North Point or Buckhead Church, what was the work experience you had before that?

Jason Young: [00:04:56] Yeah. I mean, so, most of it’s been kind of in that church space. I used to work at Life Church, which is, you know, they have 35 five campuses around the country. So, I would say that I’ve worked in churches. I’ve also worked in some business spaces with clients like Ford or Chick-fil-A, you know, different places like that outside of the church space to help them understand people. And I think that’s the big thing in the customer experience world, it’s let’s get the right product, let’s get the right process. You can bat a thousand at that. But if you don’t understand people or the emotions of people, you’re batting average drop significantly. So, for me, I actually love playing in both the church space and the business space. I love both of those worlds. And I think I can help both of those because people are people, regardless of which one we’re talking about.

Jill Heineck: [00:06:00] That’s right. So, I’d love to hear a couple of the lessons that you learned when you were working with Andy at North Point.

Jason Young: [00:06:10] I would probably say the biggest – probably two biggest things with Andy – and these were consistent. One, he deeply, deeply cares about the guest. And I used to hear people say that about other pastors or CEOs or EVPs or whoever was responsible for that. But it’s different when you filter your decisions through that. And that’s what he did. And so, it was a great – I knew that about him from a distance. But then, up close and then reporting to him, I saw that was really real. So, I learned that if you’re going to make decisions for the guests, you have to filter those decisions to how the guest feels. The second thing I would say is the people that carry out those moments to the guests – the volunteers in this case and staff – incredibly important.

Jason Young: [00:07:05] And then, I said two things, but I lied. Three things. The third thing would be excellent, excellent, excellent. And so, how do you consistently achieve excellence and then figure out looking ahead what does it look like for us to sustain it, especially in a church space when people – I don’t want to say everybody. I wouldn’t say that. But a lot of people are looking for a reason to not come back. And if it’s not excellent, that’s an easy reason for people to say, “Well, it wasn’t great. I’m moving on or I’m not coming back.” So, I would say those are the three biggest things I learned working in that organization and namely working with and alongside him.

Jill Heineck: [00:07:48] I mean, I think that that excellence kind of basis crosses over in many organizations. And as our friend, Horst Schulze, with the Ritz Carlton as a former Ritz Carlton founder, he would talk about that is the basis of his business, is bringing those guests back to the hotels over and over and over again because it’s over and above – the excellence is over and above. Right? That’s the goal.

Jason Young: [00:08:20] And the intention – and if you’re listening today, I don’t know if you have ever felt this pressure. And if you have, you’re normal. That’s the good news – is defining excellence, knowing what it is. And then, maybe there’s this internal battle that you might experience of perfection and excellence. That’s my struggle. And I ask myself, because somebody asked me this years ago, “Well, Jason. What does perfection even look like?” I don’t have a clue. I actually don’t know what it looks like. So, it sounds good. And it sounds admirable. And it sounds aspirational. But I don’t know what it looks like. Therefore, I don’t ever know when I’m there.

Jason Young: [00:09:00] In fact, the CEO of Georgia Power, Paul Bowers, one day I was in his office and I asked him this question, “How do you know?” And I started talking about perfection. He’s like, “Oh, I don’t. But here’s what I will tell you, I pursued perfection and I discover excellence.” And he goes, “So, I feel like I can quantify and qualify excellence way easier than I can perfection. But yet, I still pursue it.” So, it’s just an interesting internal struggle for myself that I assume my staff and volunteers are also navigating as well. So, if that’s you, you are in good company.

Jill Heineck: [00:09:37] Well, it’s definitely an evolution. I think that, you know, what’s working today may still keep working. But how can you improve upon that process? How can you improve upon that experience? And, you know, I’ve been in business 22 years. And every year, I’m looking back – or even every six months, we’re looking back at the holes within previous transactions so that we can continue to improve our communications plan, our delivery of our services, and things of that nature. So, I think to your point, you know, you’re pursuing it at all times. If you stop pursuing it, then maybe that’s a problem.

Jason Young: [00:10:17] Well, no. You’re right. And not to belabor this point, but I think it’s huge, especially in this COVID world that excellence is all the more important. Because it is easy for me to digitally switch to another brand, because now I don’t have to interface so much with a person. I could interface with technology. It feels less personal. So, it’s easier, potentially, for me to lead. And so, in that vein, one thing that I guess I’ve given myself permission to do and not do. I love change. And I know that sounds potentially weird to some people, because change can be stressful, and it’s pressure, and all of those things. But sometimes in the pursuit of excellence or to do things better, there is this pressure to overhaul. And so, for me, I’m giving myself permission to not overhaul, but to tweak.

Jason Young: [00:11:13] And so, you know, we don’t have time today. But if you Google Team Sky, Great Britain’s cycling team, their performance director helped them become an enormous contender and win the Tour de France back to back. And be a leader in the cycling world simply by the aggregation of marginal gains. So, just this one percent tweaks, but over a period of time. And so, maybe it’s looking at less overhaul and more just small tweaks, sticking with it, and then seeing really enormous impact come from that. That actually may lead to excellence better. That’s how I write. That’s how I change my sleep pattern. So, for me, it’s just the small things that over a period of time they aggregate for greater impact.

Jill Heineck: [00:12:02] Yeah. So, talk to me about what you’re changing up on your sleep pattern.

Jason Young: [00:12:07] So, do not model your sleep pattern after this guy. So, I will say one of the greatest struggles I have is sleep. In fact, if any of my friends are listening, they would say, “Yes. At least he knows it because we all see it.” So, for as long as I can remember, I’m – I don’t know – 12:00, 12:30 guy and get up at 4:00 a.m. And my friends, they would email me notes on sleep and books. And I’m like, “You’re right. I get it. I just got to tweak that.” And so, for me, it’s just instead of going, “Well, I’m going to get up an hour later.” I couldn’t do it. So, I would just do 15 minute increments and then I would do it for months. And then, I would change it. And so, I’m doing better on the sleep side of things.

Jason Young: [00:12:58] I think I’m internal pressured at I love productivity. And I don’t want to say there’s an addiction to productivity, but maybe there is, and that’s a weakness or an issue. And so, you know, and I’m judging myself on these things and results. And if you’re listening, you can empathize with me. And at the same time, maybe, you’re on the other side of the coin going, “This dude has problems.” And you’re right. Both of those probably. So, I think it’s tackling – I mean, that’s how I wrote my second book is, again, tweaking one percent. Because I can always come up with excuses until I discipline myself to create the change that I want by changing my behaviors. But giving myself permission to do it a little at a time.

Jill Heineck: [00:13:53] I like it. I like it a lot. I know that you and I are a lot in the same headspace. When you want to be productive, you do it early before things start getting crazy during the day. So, early is always better. But you still need sleep. So, pulling on that.

Jason Young: [00:14:09] Yeah. You’re right. Thank you. I need help.

Jill Heineck: [00:14:11] So, talk to us a little bit about the outside of your speaking business. The CXO role that you’re in at this point with the health care company.

Jason Young: [00:14:24] Yeah. I mean, I’m just sitting in a chief customer officer role. I think I approach it like this, I don’t have all the answers, but I know a lot of great people. And so, kind of giving yourself permission or giving myself permission to what do we ultimately want to achieve, and then who do I need to help make that happen, and how can I help them. So, there is this temptation not just in a CXO role, but in roles – I don’t care if you’re EVP or if your director or manager if you’re entry level, it doesn’t matter. There’s a temptation to get from people to help yourself achieve your goals or the pressure that is being put on you by your supervisor or whatever. And so, you can get from people, do your thing.

Jason Young: [00:15:16] And I think the great thing we should remember – one great thing is remember that the people at the table aren’t there just to contribute to what you’re trying to accomplish. But you are there to help contribute to them. And for me, that is both in work and personal life. Right? And so, I think sometimes we want people to – and this is for me just in the CXO role or working with church, it doesn’t matter, is I don’t want you to check everything at the door. I actually want you to bring your whole self. And if I can help you at work and then if I can help you in your life, you are more engaged because I care beyond the walls of the company. And, of course, we’re digital, so I care beyond that.

Jason Young: [00:16:04] And I think sometimes in a role we could feel pressure to get things done. And so, we’re like, “Jill, I need something from you. And, so and so, I need something from you. And, Jason.” And so, I think a lot of times I need to make deposits in other people and to help them as much as I’m asking them to help me, if not more, in addition to beyond the scope of work. And that takes work. In fact, I call it the inconvenience of intentionality. It’s inconvenient many times. But suck it up. That’s what is part of leadership and caring for people. Don’t you think that when you ask people for things, it’s inconvenient? More than likely it is. So, embracing this idea of I’m going to be intentional with Jill. I’m going to be intentional with so and so. I’m going to be intentional in building. And knowing that oftentimes the opportunities are really inconvenient. But that’s probably where a lot of the power for the company and the relationship lies. So, don’t let tasks distract you from the relationship. Allow the relationship to live as much as you want the tasks to be effective.

Jill Heineck: [00:17:16] Yeah. And I think that when you’re focusing on the team that’s delivering the product or service that you are selling, they need to feel engaged. Like you said, it’s the employee experience as much of it is the customer experience, because they’re the end user, the end receiver. So, if the employee, the team is delivering a great experience or excited about their experience within the culture of the company, then we know that the customer is going to feel that.

Jason Young: [00:17:48] Well, and it’s interesting, there’s this both end piece, potentially. And I see this in leaders. And, Jill, I’ve probably done this myself and should profusely apologize to how many other people. But I think a lot of times a leader will lead via policy, but expect the team members to lead via values. And so, I want you to deliver to the customer, the guests, our values. But I’m going to leave you with our policy. And I’m not saying people do this, but it’s easy to do. And so, the best thing I can do is I model for you what I expect you to model and deliver to the guests.

Jason Young: [00:18:34] And I think that is incredibly important. I mean, you look at companies that do it well. This is one of the things that they do. Great leaders do this well and they do it consistently. And so, for me, I work hard to try to do that. I’m not perfect at it by far. But I want people to tell me. And they tell me and sometimes it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. That didn’t feel great.” But you’re right. You’re absolutely right.

Jill Heineck: [00:18:58] So, give us an example, like, what has someone said to you?

Jason Young: [00:19:04] Yeah. So, the first thing that popped in my head, and this may not be a great example. But the first thing that popped in my head, I’m a verbal processor. So, maybe you’re listening today and you’re like, “Golly. That guy said in 60 seconds what he could have said in 20.” And you’re right. My wife would agree. My kids would agree. You’re right. And so, with that, I remember I love to talk about ideas and so I’m talking out loud. And just because I’m talking about it doesn’t mean we’re going to go do it all. And so, I remember one time there was a leader that said to me in a 360 and then I eventually sat down with this individual.

Jason Young: [00:19:46] And they said, “You know, there’s a lot of things that you talk about, but you don’t do.” And I’m an action oriented guy results. And I kind of was offended. I didn’t say that. I was trying to be this leader like, “Yeah. You’re right.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” They said, “Well, you know, you talk about, like, five things and do four.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” They said, “Yeah. So, I just assumed, like, your follow through is not good.” I’m like, “I’m good at following through.”

Jason Young: [00:20:12] What we discovered was, the way I was talking and the way this person was listening wasn’t good. So, this person said to me, “If you can tell me, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do anything right now.’ Or, ‘I’m just talking out loud.’ Or, ‘What are the expectations?’ When I walk away, I felt pressure from you that I had to help you do five things. And then, when I didn’t see you do it, I thought, ‘Well, he doesn’t feel the pressure. That’s unfair.'” So, it’s creating this unfair feeling in somebody when I don’t even know what was going on. And so, I think just giving people the right to deliver solicited and unsolicited feedback and to ask in team meetings or maybe even bring it up. You know, sometimes I would even in meetings bring up, “You know, my wife told me the other day, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is this true?” And people are like, “Well, yeah.”

Jason Young: [00:21:06] And so, it was a great opportunity for me to go, “Man, I am sorry. That probably creates more work on you guys and gals that is completely unfair.” Or, “I’m not good at this.” So, I think it is being open to listening without being defensive, which is not always easy, especially when you think the way you’re doing it is right. And using self-deprecating humor or those kinds of things. So, I don’t know if that’s helpful or not, but that’s just kind of the first example that popped in my brain.

Jill Heineck: [00:21:39] Well, and part of it is, you know, when we’re asking for feedback along the way during our work, you know, the work path during a transaction, we’re asking along the way, you know, “Is there anything that you need?” And a lot of the times they they don’t know what they need. And if they do know what they need and they do get feedback, sometimes it’s not what you expected. It might not be great. And so, you have to be open for that feedback, right? But I think, also, what you’re talking about is the pressure to then respond or react immediately to whatever feedback that you’re getting. Which, you know, again, I think you have to take your one percent tweaks and implement it that way because it’s somebody’s perception, number one. And number two, implementation is harder than it sounds in most cases and it takes longer. So, I think just, like you said, being open and just having that conversation is going to keep your team engaged. And then, again, make them want to deliver.

Jason Young: [00:22:48] Yeah. And Jill, I don’t know, this example popped in my brain. I remember sitting in a final interview with an organization. I eventually went to work for them. And it was almost like the apprentice type format interviews, multiple days, it was intense. I mean, we were taking English tests and math tests. I don’t even know what for. But they had a rhyme and reason. But I remember sitting in the very last interview and they said something to me that rocked my world but changed my world. Probably, the best thing anybody ever said. And this is what they said to me, “You’re a super talented guy, Jason. But you are not emotionally intelligent.” And I said, “Cool. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This is, you know, 12 years ago or 12 plus years ago.

Jason Young: [00:23:34] And what I discovered was there were two things happening. They were giving me feedback in an interview. They unpacked it for me. But they were also setting the tone of one of the things, as an employee of this organization, that they valued most is emotional intelligence. So, in the interview, a lot was happening. But what it did for me is it set me on a path for 10 or 12 years that I’ve worked so hard on emotional intelligence. And you know what? They were absolutely right. Because here’s what I’ve been told in my whole life up until that point, “Jason, you’re talented. Jason, you have great skills. Jason, you’re good with people.” But nobody ever told me this other small piece that actually made the other pieces that people told me I was good at even better. And so, it was a hard pill to swallow, but they were absolutely right. So, I think listening to feedback, and then just putting in the hard work, and doing it over a long period of time, and let the results be what they are.

Jill Heineck: [00:24:31] Yeah. And I think in this fast paced world, everybody wants the immediate solution to be implemented right away and see those results. But we still have to go old school and take it easy. And just see, you know, one step at a time. That’s all right. I’m the first person, I want everything done yesterday and done right and perfect.

Jason Young: [00:24:52] Oh, girl. I echo that. Come on.

Jill Heineck: [00:24:56] It doesn’t work. So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you to to share with our listeners a little bit about what your speaking experiences have brought to you. What kind of cool things are you learning as you’re kind of talking to groups about the customer experience and what kind of feedback you’re getting from your audiences?

Jason Young: [00:25:22] Yeah. So, the business of it right now looks drastically different than it did in February. I mean, rocking and rolling. And all of a sudden, we hit this thing – if you’ve never heard about it – called coronavirus. And everybody’s talking about it. And look, it impacted enormous. All live events in my world canceled this year. And so, it taught me one enormous thing. And that thing was the very thing I love, which were live events. That’s great for Jason. But what it didn’t do, it didn’t set me up well for if something were to happen like this season that we’re in right now. And so, it created a, “Hey, how much have you thought about the digital space?” And not just throwing yourself on a screen and calling it a day and it’s good enough.

Jason Young: [00:26:12] But really exploring what do people need, how to abbreviate something, new offerings, things of that nature. And so, that’s been an interesting discovery both in myself, but also in talking with faith based organizations, companies that are struggling too, other companies that are flourishing. The needs are different and the timing of the needs. And they could change from week to week. And so, that’s an overwhelming place to be as a business owner, faith based, flourishing, not flourishing, whatever. And so, I think, for me, learning how to do business differently with different offerings is something I’ve learned. And I think sometimes we wait for these moments to force us to think differently versus giving ourselves permission to think differently without the force of a season like this.

Jason Young: [00:27:12] And so, we always say, “Well, we didn’t have time.” Well, all of a sudden we’ve got plenty of time. And maybe time was never the issue. Maybe it was discipline. And so, I think, for me, that’s been a thing. I think, navigating what is – I used to [inaudible] a year or two. And now I can’t, because there’s this cliche where the fluidity of our season, so that is something. December may look different than September. So, how can I make something that might look the same or work or operable? So, what I’m trying to do is trying to create an operable framework that is helpful to companies and churches, especially when some of them have yet to reopen. So, their needs are different than those that are physically open, their buildings or churches.

Jason Young: [00:28:03] So, for me, it’s asking a lot of questions to a lot of people. And it’s asking what is something that I can do that is helpful? I want to solve it all with something that I can do that is helpful. So, I don’t know if that makes sense or if that’s even helpful. But that’s just kind of where I’m sitting at today and trying to figure things out.

Jill Heineck: [00:28:25] Yeah. So, I mean, that’s where we all are. I mean, we’ve had to pivot in our business too. And we can’t do in-person open houses. So, how are we doing this? We’re doing it on Facebook Live. We’re walking people through houses on Zoom. So, we are doing open houses. But corona has forced us to reinvent the way people seek homes and buy homes now. So, we’re all doing the same things in different spaces, right?

Jason Young: [00:28:56] So, let me ask you this question, and this is a question I’m asking myself. And I read this somewhere weeks or months ago – I think it was months ago. And I think it might have just been a line, but it really resonated with me. Trying to figure out what moments require pivoting and what moments require innovating? And for, me, I think that has been a really great challenge. Because if you’re anything like me, I hear pivot 482 times a day. I use it 482 times a day. And, eventually, people are like, “Okay. We’re all pivoting. We get it.” But asking the hard question, is this a pivot move? Or does this require me to innovate? And for me, those require different approaches, maybe even different parts of my brain. It might require different people at the table. The timeline might be different. So, they’re just different versus kind of lumping out we’re just going to pivot everything. Well, maybe.

Jason Young: [00:29:58] So, for me, I’m asking questions like, what do I need to start? What do I need to fix? What do I need to end? And maybe another set of questions can be, you know, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s missing, what’s confusing. And so, in asking myself these questions and getting other voices – I call it my table of influence. Getting a table of influencers around me and help and think through these things. Man, the result is pretty remarkable. Not because I’m remarkable. Because just the questions and the people, it just makes it better. And so, my question, maybe, to you is, have we thought about what needs to pivot or what do I need to pivot and then what do we – maybe innovation is what’s being required. I don’t know. So, just kind of a raw feeling where I’ve been the last couple of months.

Jill Heineck: [00:30:44] I definitely think innovation is more than half of it, only because we are leveraging tools that we already have to innovate ways to do different things. So, from a pivoting perspective, I would think is you’re pivoting your mindset. You’re really having to wrap your head around the current environment. And then, the innovation comes from tools that you currently have or innovate different ways to do what you’ve always done, because you have to. And we’re in that digital space. In our space, we’re doing a lot of things like reverse offers, where, maybe, last week we had a lot of offers on a property that just didn’t work for the seller. And then, a week goes by and the seller is like, “But I really still want to sell my house.” Let’s go back to these fliers, if they haven’t made a buying decision. And let’s engineer and craft a strategic reverse offer to them and see if this would work for them instead.

Jill Heineck: [00:31:35] So, reverse offers have always been around, but I think even more so. We’re seeing it more in our practice. So, it’s innovating that way as well. So, I think mindset definitely is where the pivot happens. You have to be okay with making a change. And if you don’t move, if you’re not fluid, you’re probably going to be out. And that’s particularly in our field. That’s what we’re seeing. And you also have to be COVID conscious. And the first thing is we want to make sure everybody is safe and healthy. And so, our teams have already very quickly put all that into place. We really didn’t have a choice. We’ve always been deemed essential. So, we want to still be essential and healthy and safe. So, we’ve implemented a lot of different strategies around that as well. So, just keeping it flowing.

Jill Heineck: [00:32:36] And believe it or not, real estate just kind of gone to the roof in Atlanta over the last six months. So, that’s been a good thing. People in your space that I’ve seen who speak for a living have kind of innovated and created programs online, but not as long. Or you can’t do as much one-to-one interactions, right? Because you can’t have 200 people on Zoom. It just doesn’t work. So, we have seen that. So, a lot of what our company, Keller Williams International, has done a lot of top agent training via Zoom calls. And not all of us are on it. We’re just watching them talk to us and we’re able to ask questions. And we’re getting top agents from all over the world to discuss the new strategies, and what they’re buying into, and what’s working well for them.

Jill Heineck: [00:33:26] So, I think at a high level, it’s just taking kind of, like you said, tables of influence and kind of taking what works for someone that you might be able to implement part of what they’re doing in your processes in your business. I’m curious to know if you have a standout CX strategy that you have worked on or a customer of yours worked on that’s worked really well that pops out in your head.

Jason Young: [00:33:57] Yeah. There’s two, and I’m going to maybe pick one. I think, let me go with this one. And the reason is I think it works at work and I think it works at home. I think it’s really the idea. And I didn’t come up with this idea, so I can’t credit myself with it. But it’s really just the power of being fully present with someone. And so, if I’m a real estate agent being fully present with the buyer in front of me or the seller in front of me, digitally or in person. Or if I work at a grocery store and I’m checking out. It’s the simplest scan and groceries and you feel like you get these tasks to do. What does it mean to be fully present? What does it mean if you’re a CEO and to be fully present with your your C-suite or your assistant? Or what does it mean to be fully present with your kids?

Jason Young: [00:34:59] And so, I think when we understand how powerful – I don’t mean this in an arrogant sense – but how powerful our presence is with another person. Our presence to someone else is a gift because we live in a hectic, fast paced world. And we don’t give people the right amount of time, attention, or listening, or empathy that they deserve, that we want and it strains a relationship, even though we do it in the name of productivity. I’m guilty of this. And so, I think one of the things we can do is to be mentally fully present. So, you press pause in whatever you’re thinking so you can press play on the person saying physically, fully present, watching your body language because your actions speak louder than your words.

Jason Young: [00:35:52] To be emotionally fully present, what does that mean? It means that you give somebody the gift of empathy. And empathy is not, “Oh, I’m sorry.” But empathy is jumping in with them, walk with them. And it’s not sympathy. And so, I think the more we can be fully present with a guest, a customer, people feel that. And when they feel those things, they may not go, ‘”Oh, you. You are being empathetic with me.” They’re not going to say those words, but it is what they feel. And so, maybe the thing that I’ve seem to be most powerful in the work that I do, whether it’s with a business, a church, a leader, is if I can help you to be better at being fully present with the person in front of, your leadership gets better, your relationships can better, your business gets better, your guests love you more. They remark on how remarkable you are.

Jason Young: [00:36:52] And what it does secondarily or, maybe, on a tertiary side is, it boosts your likability. And I’m not saying like self-esteem likability. But likability as a leader, likability as a brand. And people do business with brands they like. People want to work with someone they like. So, it’s an impactful thing at home and at work that the more fully present you can be with someone, the more you win. But at the end of the day, the more you help the person across from you win. Because what you’re saying to them is when I’m fully present with you, I am declaring what I value and that’s you. And that is a rare gift in the world that we live in.

Jill Heineck: [00:37:32] That’s right, especially now that everything has gone digital, because we have to. So, I think it’s really interesting. So, you know, I love how you talk about creating viral customers in your book, The Comeback Effect. And I’m interested to know how you’re kind of drawing to that point in your upcoming book. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jason Young: [00:37:59] Yes. And the next book, it comes out September 1st. It’s called The Volunteer Effect -real creative, I know. And it’s really about the person who delivers the comeback effect. And so, I think it’s super important that if you have customers one or a hundred thousand – you might use the word guest customer, so I use those interchangeably – I think sometimes we can overlook the people that deliver the experience. In fact, if you look in customer service world, those companies that rank at the top, they share a couple of things in common. But one thing that they share in common is they prioritize the employee experience. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it does mean it’s prioritized. And they do that with value system behaviors. They don’t just say it, but they demonstrate it.

Jason Young: [00:38:54] And so, I think that while the guest is important 100 percent, you can’t take care of the guests and not take care of the people who help take care of the guests. And so, what does it look like for you to take care of them? And it can be super basic. You say, “Well, I don’t have the financial resources, especially in the COVID world.” Listening is free. It does require time. But it’s not an additional expense on a sheet of paper. It’s free. And so, doing little things like that, acknowledging simple things – like, you know, again, people want to be acknowledged personally and not just in a “professional sense.”

Jason Young: [00:39:37] And so, I think, for me, in this new book, The Volunteer Effect, is really helping organizations that utilize volunteers. But there’s same principles you can extrapolate if you have staff. And how do you how do you affect them because they are going to affect the guest and customer experience. So, it’s saying this group of people is super, super important.

Jill Heineck: [00:40:03] Absolutely. Absolutely. I love everything that you’ve said today. I’m on the same page. I love a couple of the things I wanted to just kind of revisit. You said tweak versus overhaul. I love that because we kind of put the pressure on ourselves to, like, hurry up and redo everything. And then, you end up doing nothing or you do have it and you’re like, “Wait. Well, now, I half assed it. Now, what do I do?” So, I love the tweaking. Like, one percent tweaks over a period of time to create a great impact. And remind me again, you said pursue perfection.

Jason Young: [00:40:43] Yeah. And discover excellence.

Jill Heineck: [00:40:45] And discover excellence. I love that. I got in my head and did not write the rest of it down. And then, pivot versus innovate. I love that as well. I think they’re not interchangeable. And I think that there is a big difference. And I think people can take that away today. Those are what I really deem to be important points that you made today. So, tell our listeners what are a couple of the things you’d like to be known for?

Jason Young: [00:41:18] I think I’d love to be known for someone who cares about other leaders and puts in the work and effort to invest in them. And then, the second thing is I want guests and customers when they walk away to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel valued. And so, if I can be known for helping accomplish those two things, because at the end of the day, I love to ask this question to companies and to leaders. But this is applicable to anybody. At home, when people walk away from you, what do you want them to feel about you? Your brand, you as a leader, you as a customer service person, whoever it is, mom, dad.

Jason Young: [00:42:04] And so, for me, I think I want people to say that guy invests in me as a leader, as a person. And then, I help create moments that guests feel cared for and really, really valued. Because, for me, hospitality, it’s an antiquated word in many industries. Customer experience, customer service, those are the words we use. But, really, hospitality is an older word. But, for me, hospitality is intentionally providing a guest or a customer with generous care. And when you do that, when you do that with other people, when you do that with guests, it’s a remarkable place to be. And so, I’d love to be known for those things.

Jill Heineck: [00:42:48] Well, Jason, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us, to talk with me, and to share with our listeners your nuggets. Dropping some knowledge on everybody here today. I appreciate it so much. And I want to thank everybody who is listening to us today for listening. I’m really proud to share the show with you as we love to highlight and showcase the customer experience as a legit business strategy. And reminding us that no matter the business you’re in, whether it’s real estate, speaking, faith based organizations, the customer experience should always be the heart of the business.

About Your Host

Jill-Heinick-Customer-Experience-RadioJill Heineck is a leading authority on corporate relocations, and is highly sought after for her real estate industry acumen and business insights. As a published author, frequent panelist and keynote speaker, Jill shares her experience and perceptions with people from around the globe.

Jill is a founding partner of Keller Williams Southeast, established in 1999, and the founder and managing partner of Heineck & Co. Her real estate practice specializes in corporate relocations, individual relocations, luxury residential, and commercial properties. Jill’s analytical approach to problem-solving, along with her expert negotiation skills and sophisticated marketing, deliver superior results to her clients. Her winning strategies and tenacious client advocacy have earned her a reputation for excellence among Atlanta’s top producers.

While Jill has received many accolades throughout her career, she is most gratified by the personal testimonials and referrals she receives from her clients. Jill’s unwavering commitment to the customer experience, and her focus on the unique needs of each client, serve as the foundation of her success.

Follow Jill Heineck on LinkedIn.

Decision Vision Episode 79:  Should I Take on a Business Partner? – An Interview with Evelyn Ashley of Trusted Counsel

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Evelyn Ashley
Decision Vision
Decision Vision Episode 79:  Should I Take on a Business Partner? - An Interview with Evelyn Ashley of Trusted Counsel
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Decision Vision Episode 79:  Should I Take on a Business Partner? – An Interview with Evelyn Ashley, Trusted Counsel

Attorney and business advisor Evelyn Ashley joins host Mike Blake to discuss the practical questions of business partnerships and what makes for a good business partnership. “Decision Vision” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Evelyn Ashley, Managing Partner, Trusted Counsel Ashley, LLC

Evelyn Ashley advises clients on matters such as mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, financing and investments, corporate governance, intellectual property strategy, as well as protection, monetization and licensing; commercial agreements and ventures, including manufacturing, distribution, and agency; entity structure and related issues, corporate spin-outs, and international transactions. She has wide ranging experience and brings a refreshing, results focused, pragmatic approach to the practice of law.

She has practiced in large, medium, and boutique legal practices, finding that the latter gives her the most professional and personal satisfaction and flexibility. After practicing with Morris, Manning & Martin and co-founding and building Balboni, Ashley & Schoenberg, Evelyn founded and grew Red Hot Law Group, which quickly became a noted technology boutique law firm.  She was also co-founder of Red Hot Venture Consulting, a strategic consulting firm and incubator for technology businesses affiliated with the law firm.  Red Hot Law was acquired by Long Aldridge & Norman (now Dentons) in 2001, and Evelyn served as a Partner, heading the Firm’s technology practice. She left the Dentons predecessor at the end of 2003 to form Trusted Counsel Ashley LLC.

Prior to graduation from law school, Evelyn served on The Coca-Cola Company’s mergers and acquisition team that created and took Coca-Cola Enterprises public.  Her first employment out of college was as a tender offer corporate paralegal at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York in the early ‘80s.

Along with Trusted Counsel’s Partner John Monahon, Evelyn co-hosts “In Process: Conversations about Business in the 21st Century,” a radio show and podcast where national guests are interviewed on emerging business trends, ideas and techniques.

Evelyn loves creating and collecting art, choosing on the basis of what she likes, not what “experts” say is art… Evelyn and her husband Alan McKeon are avid travelers to both exotic and “usual suspect” locales.

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Mike Blake, Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series

Michael Blake is Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series and a Director of Brady Ware & Company. Mike specializes in the valuation of intellectual property-driven firms, such as software firms, aerospace firms and professional services firms, most frequently in the capacity as a transaction advisor, helping clients obtain great outcomes from complex transaction opportunities. He is also a specialist in the appraisal of intellectual properties as stand-alone assets, such as software, trade secrets, and patents.

Mike has been a full-time business appraiser for 13 years with public accounting firms, boutique business appraisal firms, and an owner of his own firm. Prior to that, he spent 8 years in venture capital and investment banking, including transactions in the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company is a regional full-service accounting and advisory firm which helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality. Brady Ware services clients nationally from its offices in Alpharetta, GA; Columbus and Dayton, OH; and Richmond, IN. The firm is growth minded, committed to the regions in which they operate, and most importantly, they make significant investments in their people and service offerings to meet the changing financial needs of those they are privileged to serve. The firm is dedicated to providing results that make a difference for its clients.

Decision Vision Podcast Series

“Decision Vision” is a podcast covering topics and issues facing small business owners and connecting them with solutions from leading experts. This series is presented by Brady Ware & Company. If you are a decision maker for a small business, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at decisionvision@bradyware.com and make sure to listen to every Thursday to the “Decision Vision” podcast.

Past episodes of “Decision Vision” can be found at decisionvisionpodcast.com. “Decision Vision” is produced and broadcast by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX®.

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/brady-ware/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bradywareCPAs/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradyWare

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bradywarecompany/

Show Transcript

Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional full service accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:21] And welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast giving you, the listener, clear vision to make great decisions. In each episode, we discuss the process of decision making on a different topic from the business owner’s or executive’s perspective. We aren’t necessarily telling you what to do, but we can put you in a position to make an informed decision on your own and understand when you might need help along the way.

Mike Blake: [00:00:40] My name is Mike Blake and I’m your host for today’s program. I’m a director at Brady Ware & Company, a full service accounting firm based in Dayton, Ohio. With offices in Dayton, Columbus, Ohio, Richmond, Indiana, and Alpharetta, Georgia. Brady Ware is sponsoring this podcast, which is being recorded in Atlanta for social distancing protocols. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast aggregator. And please consider leaving a review of the podcast as well.

Mike Blake: [00:01:06] Today’s topic is, should I take on a business partner? And as we record podcast number 79 in the series, I realized I’m derelict in not getting to this topic sooner. It really should have been in one of the top ten and I’m not quite sure why we didn’t get to it sooner. Because this is a topic that, for many people in businesses, is one of the most important decisions they’ll ever make. And it is a decision, as we will learn with our guest, you often have to make many times over in your career or over the life of a business or several businesses. And we see, unfortunately, that quite often making the bad decisions or making this decision poorly can lead to very painful results and outcomes.

Mike Blake: [00:02:05] And I, myself, have been a business partner. I’ve taken on business partners with varying degrees of success. I’m in a partnership now with 23 other people, I think, that have not thrown me out yet. And I’ve only threatened to burn the building down twice. And I’ve been in a business partnership that lasted exactly two months, and really should have lasted one. But the benefit of that was that we all realized that was a mistake early in accordance with best practices of Google. And being inspired by Google, we decided to fail fast. And that also was a very good decision.

Mike Blake: [00:02:49] We’ll probably have an episode at some point soon on should I exit or should I terminate a business partnership. Because, you know, all business partnerships end. It’s just a matter of the manner and expectedness in which they actually do end. So, I’m looking forward to a very deep and profound, a very impactful discussion today. And as our guest noted, this could actually be a-half-a-day seminar just based on the questions I have written. And maybe, maybe we’ll have her back if she’s willing to do it. We have not yet had a repeat guest. Most of them are wise by the end of this thing. But maybe we’ll fool her into coming back. But there’s a lot of – this is a good topic I’m looking forward to.

Mike Blake: [00:03:33] And joining us today is my friend and someone I’ve been trying to get on this podcast for forever. But I think it would have been easier to get Beyonce to come on this thing. But my friend, Evelyn Ashley, who is managing partner of Trusted Counsel, a law firm here in Atlanta. And Evelyn is a person that, herself, has been a partner in law firms, as managing partner of her own firm, has had partners come in, has had partners come out. She’s married to one of them. And she’s really been through – I’m guessing she’s been through or has addressed some permutation of every business partner relationship that you can possibly imagine. And I think we’re going to hear some cool war stories today.

Mike Blake: [00:04:21] Trusted Counsel is a firm specializing in corporate law and intellectual property. They are a WBENC certified woman owned businesses that represent small and medium private company clients on matters such as mergers and acquisitions, financing and investments, intellectual property strategy, commercialization protection, licensing, manufacturing, distribution and destruction related issues, corporate spin outs, international transactions. Their lawyers have wide ranging experience and bring a results focused, pragmatic business approach to the practice of law.

Mike Blake: [00:04:53] Evelyn has practiced in large, medium, and boutique legal practices. Finding that the latter gives her the most professional and personal satisfaction and flexibility. And I suspect, also, that Evelyn is like me, we don’t take orders well. After practicing with Morris, Manning & Martin and co-founding and building Balboni, Ashley & Schoenburg, Evelyn founded and grew Red Hot Law Group, which if you’re not from Atlanta or if you are from Atlanta but you’re not of a certain age, they were the startup law firm. It took a lot of companies from venture or startup to venture funding and took a bunch of them public as well, I believe. So, in their day, they were the name in technology here in Atlanta and, really, in southeast.

Mike Blake: [00:05:40] She was also co-founder of Red Hot Venture Consulting, a strategic consulting firm, an incubator for technology businesses affiliated with the law firm. Red Hot, while it was acquired by Long Aldridge & Norman, now Dentons, in 2001. And Evelyn served as a partner heading the firm’s technology practice. I didn’t know you were acquired by Dentons. She left Dentons predecessor at the end of 2003 to form Trusted Counsel.

Mike Blake: [00:06:07] Prior to graduation from law school, Evelyn served in the Coca-Cola Company’s mergers and acquisitions team that created and took Coca-Cola Enterprises public. I did not know that. Her first employment out of college was as a tender offer corporate paralegal at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York in the early 1980s. There got to be some stories there. Along with – sorry.

Mike Blake: [00:06:29] Evelyn also co-hosts In Process: Conversations about Business in the 21st Century, a radio show and podcast where national guests are interviewed on an emerging business trends, ideas, and techniques. And her podcast has been around way longer than this one, so do give that a listen. And I think I was on one of the early episodes of that, if I’m not mistaken. Or they may have deleted it.

Mike Blake: [00:06:49] Evelyn loves creating and collecting art, choosing on the basis of what she likes, not what experts say is art. Evelyn and her husband, Alan McKinnon, are avid travelers to both exotic and usual suspect locales. And in fact, sometimes when I’m feeling sort of isolated, I will take their Facebook pictures, put it up on my 4K monitor, grab a cup of Tension Tamer Tea, and will just go to one of those places. And right now, if you want to travel, that’s pretty much the only way to get there. So, I’m glad you’re doing that. Evelyn, thank you for coming on the program.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:07:21] Thanks for having me, Mike. That’s such a mouthful. Now, I’m so exhausted having reflected on what I’ve done over my career. I do think that I need to – well, I need to think about bringing on a business partner so I can retire, you know?

Mike Blake: [00:07:38] Well, the goal is to wear down the gas before we get to the interview. So, I’m glad to hear we may have accomplished that to some extent. So, as I said, one of the reasons I want to get you on this program and talk about this topic is, you know, you don’t just have bias in this topic. You’ve lived it, right? And you’re living kind of one of these partnership moments, if you will, in real time, as we’ve talked about before the program. And I know you’re not going to get into specifics about that, but I think it’s important to understand that you’re not just an academic. You are definitely a practitioner when it comes to business partnerships.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:08:17] That’s true.

Mike Blake: [00:08:17] Business partners can be such a pain in the neck. And I am a pain in the neck business partner. I’ll be the first to tell you and everybody else will be second. Why would you take one on? Why would you deal with this?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:08:33] Well, I mean, I think it’s important for any business owner to actually realize that throughout the growth of a business and then even kind of the exit of that person or the business itself through a sale or maybe retirement, it’s important to know that you probably want to grow. So, increase revenue, expand the territory where your products and services are offered, bring in expertise that you don’t have, bringing capital that you need. And then, you know, that whole idea of succession planning that I already mentioned.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:09:19] So, yes, it can be challenging to have business partners, because we’re all human and we all have different personalities and attitudes. But the reality of a good partnership – and I’m using that kind of in the general business term because there’s a legal term of art that means something completely different. But I think that good partnerships can grow great businesses. And that’s why you actually put up with the challenge of them.

Mike Blake: [00:09:58] So, are there different kinds of business partners? I don’t necessarily mean good partners versus bad partners, because that’s a different kind of case. But are there different kinds of partners? I guess, for example, in the CPA world, we have equity partners, which I happen to be. There are also non-equity equity partners and different sort of classifications. In law, I guess there’s something called of counsel, which I kind of understand. Are there different classifications of business partners and why does that matter? Why do different classifications or partner identifications exist?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:10:39] So, I think within professional services, which really is kind of the law, the management consulting, the accounting and CPA structures, yes, you typically would have, at least, two kinds of partners. An of counsel isn’t really a partner. They might go by that bill at some point, but it’s a misnomer within the scope of the business.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:11:02] And an equity partner, basically, it’s someone who, personally, has the hopes and dreams that they’ll become an equity partner and share in the profits of the business. And then, of course, the equity partners are usually the ones that are very focused on rainmaking and business development, as well as also the doing of the work. And so, tend to share much more in the benefits, the profits that actually come out of that business.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:11:32] Within general businesses, there’s a much more expansive scope of “business partner.” As I kind of alluded, one of the reasons to take partners on, you know, if you look at it from the narrow, a co-owner, but as you broaden the scope of potential, that could also be an investor to the business that doesn’t work in the business, but brings access to not only money but to a network and maybe business introductions for expanding the business. That also can be a “partner.” Although, we’ll talk a little bit more about how they typically interact with the business.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:12:26] But then, also “strategic partners” other businesses that can – because they’re complementary in products and services or perhaps they’re in a different geographic location, they help businesses to expand that business faster without having to have the internal overhead, and cost, and expense, and risk of actually expanding into those areas. So, I think that there’s a large potential scope of what a business partner can be.

Mike Blake: [00:13:02] Now, you and I have one thing in common and that we do a lot of work with emerging technology companies, high growth companies. Part of the recipe there is that they’re taking on some form of equity investment. We typically call them “investors.” But in point of fact, many of them would be considered legally and maybe functionally partners, right?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:13:26] Yeah. Well, because they are – if we’re using the business terminology of a “partner,” then an investor would be a partner. They’re not necessarily – typically, they come in and they want a return on their investment. They are more concerned from the financial perspective of return inside the business. They’re not usually part of the day to day operation of the business. If you have an angel investor that is interested in working for some time, sometimes they’ll actually do that for a while. But it’s very unusual for an investor to actually come in and grow with the intent of every day in their growing the business.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:14:15] So, you know, having that kind of investor relationship, as they said, can be very beneficial growth-wise. And within technology, if you have a technology that has major impact on a market, it’s very typical that you would want external capital to help you actually grow it fast because speed to market and growth is pretty critical in that kind of sector. But there are many other businesses where you might say, “Well, this can actually help me to bootstrap the business faster. I’m not necessarily going to grow it and sell it out or do a public offering.” But there are also reasons to actually have kind of that investor partner involved, too.

Mike Blake: [00:15:07] And the vocabulary, the legal vocabulary makes that, I think, a bit more confusing. Because there is a legal form of a partnership. But investors, like we’re talking about, typically invest in some sort of corporate form, usually a sequel of their venture investor, so they’d be called shareholders. But depending on their involvement, they may function as a partner. Some will actually take on a formal role in the business. And others are kind of more, we would consider, maybe a silent or quasi absentee partner.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:15:38] Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s important – the legal term of our partner, basically, if we’re in a legal partnership, kind of the most key challenge of those kinds of relationships is, if you and I were in a partnership, and I was kind of wild and did some things that maybe you didn’t agree with, you, under a partnership structure, would be liable for the risk that I have created inside the business or the potential losses.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:16:18] Within a limited liability company, where you have a member, in a corporation where you have shareholders, those individuals are protected. They are essentially capped at their investment in the business with regard to losses and liabilities. Unless, of course, they’ve signed personal guarantees and then that’s a different situation.

Mike Blake: [00:16:40] And that’s a really good point. I, generally, had not thought of that really through. But the nature of the partnership and the relative incentive structures can be very sharply impacted by the nature of the corporate form. And this may be just my myopic view, because I work in finance. I’m in a CPA firm. So, of course, everything to me looks like a tax or a finance problem. So, when people ask me, “What kind of corporate form should I have?” Well, the first thing I do is I tell, “Ask anybody but me.” Because I’m not really that fluent in it. But the answers I hear tend to be more, “Well, if you do this and here’s how the taxes work. If you do this, here’s how taxes work.” But on the legal side, there’s a whole different dynamic of how liability and risk is distributed or not distributed within the firm.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:17:33] Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you’re right, there are – you know, I don’t know if we want to get too much into entity choice at this point. But certainly, there are investors that are very interested, particularly in the early stages of a business, in the losses that can actually come out of a business. Because if I invest cash and I know that business is going to have some losses for the next few years, I can actually get a tax benefit against my profits that I’ve received from other businesses. And so, that can be very attractive, particularly to individual investors and then also family offices, because that’s usually one person or a family’s money. And so, they like to flow it through.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:18:21] Within venture capital, of course, because they have limited partners inside their funds, they want to cut off that flow. And that’s why a C Corp from a tax perspective to them is very attractive. It cuts off the flow. But the other side of that is, they can also rely very much on the statutory structure of corporations, which is very, very expensive. So, things like corporate governance and minority shareholder structures, they can actually – they have confidence that that entity is going to protect them and things will be done in a certain way simply because of the statutory format.

Mike Blake: [00:19:05] Yeah. And I’ll just sort of add a footnote, as Evelyn is alluding to, this in itself could easily be a multi-hour conversation. It really requires an analysis of the particular facts, circumstances, and goals of a particular partnership. So, I don’t think we will – I certainly hope we will never ever have a show specifically on corporate structure.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:19:30] Come on. This is key. And very interesting.

Mike Blake: [00:19:34] For all I know I’m going to get an email tomorrow saying I’ve already done one and I just forgotten. But the point here is that corporate structure is important and it’s complex. Don’t take anything you hear off this show and all of a sudden start filing corporate documents. Talk to both your CPA and your attorney to help you figure out kind of what’s best for you. So, those are disclaimer at no additional cost to the listener.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:20:04] Exactly. Thank you.

Mike Blake: [00:20:06] In your experience, does the distinction between an active versus a silent partner come up? Is it often a choice that’s even in the hands of the founder or whoever is sort of offering the partnership? And let me give us some context to that. As you know, I do a lot of shareholder or membership divorces. And to me, the biggest and the most frequent reason I’m engaged to do one of these is that, at the outset, two or more partners or people had gotten together and said, “We’re going to go build this business. Take over the world.” And then, one or more of them kind of lose interest and stop working. And then, the other one or two feel like they’re doing all the effort and putting all the value. And then, the other person kind of sitting on the beach and doing, say, smoke and drinking cocktails with little umbrellas in them. And so, they want to get that person out. Right? And so, that person can transition from being an active to a silent partner.

Mike Blake: [00:21:14] So, with that in mind, is there a rule or is there kind of a decision flow chart that can help somebody listening identify whether or not they should be seeking or bringing in an act of sort of operational partner? Or if it should be somebody that’s from the outset is designed to be silent, which usually means just give me the capital and maybe some of your Rolodex and I’ll do the rest.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:21:40] Right. You know, I think the choice of the concept of the silent partner, if we call that silent partner as a capital access, I think, those choices really are based on what the business is, what the business plan is, what’s going to happen over the next two, three, five years. And if you’ve got an owner or a group of owners inside that business that have growth plans, therefore, in that situation, a “silent partner” can certainly work.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:22:18] I think from the concept of I’m an operator and I have a silent partner who used to be an operator, but is now sitting on the beach or I’m getting divorced and my spouse is going to end up having a partial ownership in this business as a result, all of those events are usually tied to the fact that you don’t have a very good owner agreement in place with your partner.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:22:53] And you’ll find that in the early years of many businesses, founder-owners will sit there saying, “I can’t have these difficult conversations. I can’t afford to have this conversation. I just don’t want to. I just don’t want to do this.” And that is really where the failing will happen, because something that is going to cost you, probably, a few thousand dollars to get in place in the early years could end up costing you your business in many ways. It could end up costing multi-thousands of dollars to get a whole variety of people in to help break up that relationship. Or it could just lead to being pissed off all the time while that partner is sitting on the beach.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:23:46] I have, years ago, two founders, and they were best friends from high school. And both were very technological programmers. One was very social. And after college, they were like, “Yeah. We’re going to start a business.” They went into it. They had a very basic shareholder agreement. And about ten years into it, the business was growing. It was doing well. It was actually throwing out some profits for them. But one of the owners basically said, “You know, I’m married. You’re not married. I have four kids and a wife. I am going to have a very early mid-life crisis here at 31. And so, I’m not going to divorce my wife and kids, but I’m going to divorce you.” And, unfortunately, it was a 50/50 split. And they didn’t have an agreement that addressed what would happen if someone wanted to leave.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:24:57] And so, in that situation, they could not come to an agreement on a buyout because the departing partner had a very high expectation of what the value was and did not want to believe the appraisal. And so, they could never come to a conclusion on this. The one thing that he did do was he allowed the partner who was – the shareholder who was still in the business to control the board. And so, he was able to do a little bit of work around growth inside of the business. But that is a situation where he was pissed. That partner who stayed was pissed for the next five years, basically. And then, he did raise external capital, which the other agreed to, which kind of broke the breakup between them.

Mike Blake: [00:25:55] Stay on them.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:25:56] Yes, exactly. The deadlock, if you will. But expensive, stressful, horrible, actually. And so, those are all important things to be thinking about as you’re in business. And it doesn’t matter where you are in the business. If you don’t have a good agreement, you really need to take care of it because disaster happens in many ways.

Mike Blake: [00:26:22] I make a lot of money off of bad agreements.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:26:27] Well, you know, and probably good agreement, too, because good agreements will actually call for an appraisal. But what you need in that situation is the process and the procedure to actually make sure that it’ll be followed and the exiting shareholder or owner actually gets out.

Mike Blake: [00:26:47] Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in your experience, are people who tend to be alike, do they tend to make better business partners? Or people who are less alike, maybe, are more complementary? Do they make better business partners or is that all over the board?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:27:05] I think people who are alike – people need to be alike, but they need to be different. So, I think the best ownership relations are people that have the same attitude toward culture inside the business, with the environment, how do we treat our people, what are the benefits that we want to provide. All of those kind of soft play things that go along with creating a place people want to be. Do we have similar views on money? You know, are we in this because we want to make a massive killing? Are we in it because we just really want to have a a business where we have a great lifestyle? Can I trust you with my money? You know, with each other’s money. What’s our work ethic? What’s our values? Those are things that you really do need to have alignment on.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:28:11] From a different perspective, I think some of the best partners are those that are complementary to each other. Certainly, one needs to be more of the strategist and have the big vision. The other needs to be the executor, needs to kind of be the internal focus. Someone needs to make sales. So, similarities are important, but difference is also important.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:28:49] In your experience, what are the most frequent reasons partnerships don’t work out?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:28:57] Well, because human beings are human beings. And a lot of human beings –

Mike Blake: [00:29:02] Stupid human beings.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:29:02] Yes. Darn. You know, attitudes change, life changes as certain challenges get presented. You know, I think we’re in a big situation right now in a pandemic where it’s pretty clear that cracks in business relationships are probably being identified. Maybe cracks in marriages are being identified as people are spending all day every day with each other. So, I think, it has to do with economic challenges from a broad perspective kind of in the market, but also economic challenges within the business. And, you know, just life will do it.

Mike Blake: [00:30:01] You know, I think that is such a good answer and it’s not the one I expected. But knowing you, I should have expected to hear that from you. And that goes to why the right documentation is so important and so hard, because the one cause about humans is that they change. If you never change as a human being, there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s a natural human condition that your circumstances will change, your health will change, your priorities will change.

Mike Blake: [00:30:39] I was a horrible person in my 20s. I’m a less horrible person in my 50s, I like to think. And we all change, right? And the partnership and the way you think about the partnership and the way you structure it needs to be flexible in order to accommodate the inevitability of change.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:31:00] Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s kind of like, good fences build good neighbors. Good contracts build good partnerships. And, typically, we’ll take into account, basically, every kind of downside that can happen as the business goes forward. The other reason, too, why partnerships fail is that, just as you said, in our 20s, we’re kind of trying to figure it out. In our 30s, we’re kind of getting it together. Sometimes by the time we hit our 30s and our 40s, we’re like, “Holy cow, this isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

Evelyn Ashley: [00:31:41] Or the business has grown to a size where my skills actually don’t work inside the business anymore. And so, there needs to be a rotation almost of owners. And maybe that doesn’t mean that I have to be gone, you know, out of the business as an owner. But it probably does bring me down to a lower percentage of the business as new people come in that can actually grow it.

Mike Blake: [00:32:12] You know, that latter part is a really smart point and one that I don’t think is talked about – just talked about a lot. When we think of the captains of industry and the ones that have founded companies and are really sort of legendary, whether it’s Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, or somebody else.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:32:33] Bill Gates.

Mike Blake: [00:32:35] Bill Gates. It’s not just that they were technology visionaries. Frankly, there are a lot of those. But the fact that they have the skill sets and could evolve to run a startup and to run a publicly held multibillion dollar multinational business, that’s the uniqueness. That’s the prodigy part. And if you happen to be a prodigy, great. But maybe your partnerships – or at least ask the question, well, what if we’re not all prodigies? What if we’re not all the next Bill Gates? And just because a company outgrows somebody’s skill set, it doesn’t mean you have to kick them to the curb, right?

Mike Blake: [00:33:17] Maybe a great example of that is Steve Wozniak. There came a point – I don’t know him. I call him Steve. He calls me who the hell are you? But I suspect that to a point at which he said, “Look, I’m not the guy that’s going to be CTO of a multibillion dollar company. I still want to tinker and invent things and be a futurist and technology advocate.” And Apple didn’t just kick him to the curb. They’ve figured out a way to let him fulfill himself within that company.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:33:45] Exactly. Exactly. And in all honesty, I do think that one of the failings of Media Bites, which I have many opinions on the failings of Media Bites. But with regard to technologists that actually become big leaders and highly successful, I think, what happens is other technologists view them and say, “That’s me. That’s me, too.” But it’s so hard to actually be that person who does go through those transitional elements and allows others, you know, it becomes – it’s respect, actually. It’s respect and it’s trust, which is kind of one of the points I want to raise for choosing a good partner.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:34:40] But if I am the founder of the business, I have to be willing to be respectful of other people’s skills and their ability to get the boat higher in the water, if you will. And I think that’s one of the keys. Steve Jobs, may be not so much really brilliant, complete driver. Not necessarily too respectful of the people around him. But others generally do except that. Other people know things they don’t and they can help them to succeed the critical part of business growth, really. Any business, not just technology.

Mike Blake: [00:35:22] So, many business partnerships, not all, but many arise out of existing friendships. Is that a good basis for a business partnership? Does that create unique dangers in a potential business partnership when, “Hey, we’ve been friends for a long time. We got to be business partners. Let’s go.”

Evelyn Ashley: [00:35:44] Yeah, I don’t agree in a – I guess I don’t agree with the idea that, “Wow. Because we are besties or really long term and we just love each other,” subjective reasons are not the reasons to actually have a business partner. You have to have a set of objective criteria of what am I trying to achieve. Or if we’re together and we’re putting that together, again, what do we have with regard to the business? How are we alike? How are we different? How would we handle X, Y, Z?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:36:24] So, I think it’s critically important when you’re thinking about going into business or bringing in someone after, do they meet the key objective criteria? I think it can be great fun. It’s important to like your partners. You don’t necessarily have to love them. And you don’t have to want to spend all your time with them. You’re going to spend a good amount of time with them. So, you probably don’t want to be, like, totally annoyed by them.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:36:59] But I just think the other thing, you have to look at it like – you have to look at a business partnership almost like marriage. You have to choose based on what your personal criteria really are. And you can’t look at someone and say, “Not to worry. They’re almost there because I can change them and then they’ll be perfect.” It fails every time, right?

Mike Blake: [00:37:30] Yeah. You know, and the partnership I was in that – and I was not exaggerating – last two months or the last one, we were friends. We had a conversation for years and really thought we knew each other. We thought that was just going to sort of lead to the nirvana. But then, once we actually had to operate with each other, we actually had different communication styles, different priorities, different skill sets, frankly.

Mike Blake: [00:37:57] And particularly, since I was joining a partnership, I have skill sets that were very valuable, just not to them. And the things they needed were things that I was not good at and didn’t want to get better at. It was a real shock to the system. It shocked us that it didn’t work. And I think it shocked a lot of observers in the market, our competitors. I mean, they were really afraid when we joined forces that we were going to dominate the market. And it it collapsed very quickly. And I’m glad that it did, because we’re now still friends. If we tried to hang on for six months, we would not still be friends.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:38:34] I think that’s really important. I’ve got a great example of friends. So, two women that actually met each other at another company became very close friends. Very different, one a creative, the other kind of much more of the seller, the kind of externally focused, let’s drive revenue, but also very process oriented, which is pretty unusual in a sales person. Not to insult salespeople. But the two of them came together, decided to form a business. And within the first three months, nearly blew up because, one, the process oriented one was, “What the heck is she doing all day? Oh, my God. She’s completely ADD. She cannot focus on anything.” And the other one was, “Why is she harassing me all of the time? Leave me alone. I can’t think.”

Evelyn Ashley: [00:39:38] So, the two of them – and I thought this was really very, very unique. There are certainly business consultants that can actually help to bring partners together and kind of help them sort things out. They couldn’t afford that. It was very early stage in the business. They did find out that the health care that they had from their spouses actually provided counseling services. So, the two of them went to counseling for six months. And so, ten years later, great business, did $64 million dollars in revenue last year. Amazing. A complete turnaround. They understand the nuances and the personalities of the others and now they know how to work together. It’s cool.

Mike Blake: [00:40:23] What a great story. And a thing I want to dive into, too, that I hadn’t thought about asking, but now begs the question is that, there’s a skill to becoming a business partner, isn’t there? I mean, if you haven’t done it before and you’re used to being an employee or you’re used to being a sole practitioner or anything other than a partner, you don’t just walk in and become a great business partner in a lot of cases,. There’s a little bit of a training period.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:40:52] Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the challenges, particularly in professional services, is that lawyers, CPAs, financial people go into a partnership, are there for quite – or go into what is a partnership as an employee, perhaps an associate level. And over time have the expectation that they will become a partner. And I think what I’ve learned kind of both by doing and also by helping is, you never want to bring on a partner because of expectations. Because an employee will often always be an employee. They will not be able to handle the shifts and the changes and kind of the non-business elements, the communication, the interaction, the discussion. How do you actually come to decisions on behalf of the business together?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:42:06] And certainly founders, solos particularly, they have a challenge, too, because once you’re used to making all the decisions, it’s pretty hard to actually let somebody else in. So, there is communication and wanting to succeed together is absolutely critical.

Mike Blake: [00:42:29] So, that segues nicely to the next question, which is – and I know you’ve been in this position – when you’re considering to take somebody on as a business partner, how do you vet them? What are the most important things you do to vet a potential business partner?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:42:47] So, really, the first thing is, what, again, is the criteria for the right partner? What does the business need? And so, once you’ve identified that, I think you have to ask the question – and this was actually put to me many, many years ago as I was going into founding my first law firm with another partner. He told me, you must have mutual respect or you must have mutual trust. But you always must have financial integrity. So, you can respect that person. It’s great if you also trust that person. But as long as you respect that person, you don’t necessarily have to be completely trustworthy. But within the business, you have to know that you could trust that person from the financial perspective of the business itself.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:43:57] So, you know, these are all elements, so it is both a soft element, but it’s also, again, what’s their work ethic? Does our work ethic mesh? Because if one of us wants to retire and the other one wants to grow big, is that going to be a challenge or can we actually just migrate it to allow that person to take the reins and move forward? I think what’s really important too, again, in business partnerships – and this doesn’t work so much, certainly, not in the Dentons world or anything. But you do need to have someone who acts as the CEO. And that could be an executive committee of a large partnership to a small group of partners that kind of are making choices. But it’s very hard for us all to move together forward and be successful. You know, typically you need to allow someone to have the responsibility, the control, and, again, trust that they will do the right thing on behalf of everyone in the business and, certainly, the owners of the business.

Mike Blake: [00:45:24] So, assuming that it’s an external partner – if it’s an internal partner, there’s a different dynamic because you have information inside. You would not as easily obtain from an externally sourced partner. So, you know, if you’re considering – I know you brought in external partners. If you’re looking at an externally sourced partner, how do you go about finding those things out? Do you do a background check? Do you ask to see work samples? Do you talk to their clients? Do you consult the tarot deck? What do you do?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:46:01] Well, I’ve always relied on the tarot myself. But, absolutely, you want to take up as much reference as you possibly can. You know, one of the things that you might think about if you kind of go through a diligence process and feel like, “Yeah. This is the person.” I think the other thing, assuming that person coming in is amenable to the idea, I think, having a six month or a 12 month period where it’s kind of, “Let’s see how it goes. Let’s work together. Let’s do this.” Maybe it depends on what business we’re talking about. But, certainly, if we’re talking about professional services, maybe that’s, “We’re working together, but we’re going to be separate entities from a back office perspective. Clients won’t necessarily know. But, you know, we will go forward as a group. But we actually have the ability to split without too much of an issue.”

Evelyn Ashley: [00:47:08] Within kind of a more product based business, it’s not unique to actually say, “Come in. Let’s work together for X amount of time. And let’s put a contract in place. If we are both agreeable to this relationship going forward, within a year the contract will actually trigger an ownership structure, a buy in or, you know, an option grant, or a restricted stock grant, or something along those lines within the business. And then, from there, we can go forward.” Pretty much if you spend time, basically, that six month to 12 month period, you’re going to know. You might know in three months, right? You might know in a month, like you did, right?

Mike Blake: [00:48:06] Yeah. And thank God we did. So, we’re speaking with Evelyn Ashley of Trusted Counsel about should I take on a business partner. And we touched upon this a little bit, but I want to come back and be explicit. What do you think about 50/50 partnerships? Can they work? I know people that are in the camp of avoid them at all costs and avoid them like murder hornets. And I know others are kind of sanguine about it. Where do you fall on that?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:48:39] So, the way I look at 50/50 partners is they happen much more often than I ever will recommend. And so, if you’re going to do it, it’s fine, but you have got to have a great contract between the two of you. Because, invariably, as we’ve already discussed, things change, people change, business changes. And so, essentially, you want to have a roadmap to separate, to divorce, if you will, the business divorce. And unfortunately, with 50/50 partners who basically split everything down the middle, all decisions we made together. It gets to a point where I think, “Wow. More power to you if you can do it.”

Evelyn Ashley: [00:49:38] And there are 50/50 partners that can do it. But at some point there’s going to be a disagreement or a split. It’s very likely. Now, it turns into can we communicate our way out of it? Can we know that, “All right. I’m going to go with what you’re so passionate with and go forward.” Or do I have to rely on my agreement that’s probably going to put me in a situation where we both agree to an independent who will come in that we both respect. Maybe that we both know that we respect that can help us to resolve our business issue. Or do I have to hire a mediator to do that?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:50:22] And then, if that doesn’t succeed, then typically what you’re going to warrant is what’s termed a Texas shootout. And essentially, if I want you out, I will make an offer to you that, basically, I would be willing to be bought out myself because I make the offer to you, you decide, fine. I’ll buy you out and take over the company. Or fine, go ahead, buy me out. And so, it does create a dynamic.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:51:01] When I first started dealing with this, I was like, “Oh, disastrous.” But the other side of that is at least it’s a process that can keep the business intact. And certainly that buyout doesn’t have to be cash. It can be a note. And so, again, you might be looking at an appraisal situation in that situation. You’ve probably dealt with those too. But sometimes they’ll just pull it from the air because they really want to get it over with. So, again, yes, they can work. And wow, there’s lots of litigation out there on the books, too, for 50/50 owners that could not agree as to what the next step of the business was. And that’s unfortunate when a judge or a jury has to make those decisions for business partners.

Mike Blake: [00:51:59] Yeah. Pretty much everybody loses at that point.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:52:04] Absolutely.

Mike Blake: [00:52:07] Do you recommend trial periods for partnerships?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:52:11] Well, like I said, I think trial partners are a good idea. You know, if you can’t actually – if there’s someone that you want to be in business with, I think you can go ahead and make the commitment to each other. But again, I think you need to know that there’s a lot of things that can come about when you start working together. That over time you realize this is not going to work. And so you, again, have to have that good agreement to figure out how do we separate from this situation.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:53:00] I think certainly from the employee perspective, in a situation where you’ve got – perhaps you’ve got an owner that wants to retire out of the business. And if you’ve got, you know, a young, sharp employee in there that wants to take it to the next level, and has worked with you for years, and you trust them, and you respect them and you know they have financial integrity, then I would say, yeah, that’s a great way of getting to the next point in the business.

Mike Blake: [00:53:39] Evelyn, we’ve covered a ton of ground today and as we predicted, I’m not going to get to all the questions, but that’s okay. I think we’ve got most of the very critical ones.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:53:50] Quite a lot.

Mike Blake: [00:53:51] If somebody wants to find out more about this topic, can they contact you? And if so, how would they best be able to do that?

Evelyn Ashley: [00:54:00] Absolutely. So, I can be reached at info@trusted-counsel, C-O-U-N-S-E-L,.com. The number is 404-898-2900. And I really would thank you very much for the promotion on the podcast. But I also want to kind of reiterate that our impressive podcasts can be found on our website. And because we focus on business conversations, typically there’s about five years of content sitting there. So, private company owners often find it very helpful and educational kind of with regard to their businesses. So, I hope they’ll go check it out.

Mike Blake: [00:54:53] Yeah. Right after you listen to this podcast, go check that one out. You will not be disappointed. And that’s going to wrap it up –

Evelyn Ashley: [00:55:00] And your podcast is still up there, Mike

Mike Blake: [00:55:03] Oh, good. Good. I appreciate that.

Evelyn Ashley: [00:55:09] Of course. We –

Mike Blake: [00:55:09] That’s going to wrap it up for today’s program. I’d like to thank Evelyn Ashley so much for joining us and sharing her expertise with us today. We’ll be exploring a new topic each week, so please tune in so that when you’re faced with your next executive decision, you have clear vision when making it. If you enjoy these podcasts, please consider leaving a review with your favorite podcast aggregator. That helps people find us that we can help them.

Mike Blake: [00:55:32] Once again, this is Mike Blake. Our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. And this has been the Decision Vision podcast.

Bias and Its Impact E4

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Phoenix Business Radio
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Bias and Its Impact E4
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Bias and Its Impact E4

Our guest, @AskDrDorothy provided clear and often “bam” insight into our biases as we accumulate as we navigate life. Her thought-provoking nuggets of goodness came down to a one simple starting point…awareness. Understanding biases resulting in discrimination in policing, education, health care, and more were discussed. Dismal facts were shared regarding African Americans in Washington State and Spokane, Washington, Karen Loomis’ hometown.

Learn specific tools to help you understand your own personal bias and how they might play out in your day to day. From Facebook groups to books and more…tools are shared.

Dr. Dorothy and her team work to support their clients become the most authentic heart/soul centered leaders possible. Their belief in Servant Leadership, and leadership as a spiritual calling, impacts everything they do whether in speaking, offering groups, training/consulting, or doing private 1-1 coaching.

DorothyMartin-Neville-00032Dorothy A. Martin-Neville, PhD, international speaker, best-selling author, consultant/master coach, and frequent radio, podcast, and television guest is also Past-President of the National Speakers Association – CT, and the founder of 4 companies.

A psychotherapist, Dr. Dorothy was in practice for 25+ years. Today, in supporting individual Executive Coaching clients in recognizing their unique leadership style Dorothy brings first-hand knowledge of the challenges facing those who want to live and work in a culture that feeds them rather than drains them.

Her experiences as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of a multi-million dollar Frontier Medicine Grant, recipient of NIH grant funding to research her work in Fibromyalgia, her role as a Clinical Instructor as the University of CT medical school, a graduate school teacher, and founder of a pioneer school in integrative health, expand her ability to support her clients far beyond pure business and leadership success.

She knows that success in health, balance, and life is imperative. She knows it all begins with becoming the Real Woman you are meant to be.

Connect with Dr. Dorothy on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The Emerson Theater Collaborative (ETC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to serve youth, under-represented communities and artists with an emphasis on diversity, by producing innovative and thought-provoking theater both in southeastern Connecticut and Sedona, Arizona. One such example is a wonderful play called Vivian’s Music 1969 by Monica Bauer that was a featured program at ETC in February 2020.

Camilla-Ross-on-Phoenix-Business-RadioXCamilla Ross is the President and Chairman of Emerson Theater Collaborative, Inc., Producer and Actress (Portray’s Harriet Tubman – Harriet Tubman’s Dream written by Lisa Giordano). She is also the President and Chairman of the Sedona Arts Academy.

“To be a catalyst for social change is really where it’s at for me,” Camilla said. “I believe theater should always be a venue for social change. I love the art of live theater and love what it does to the human soul and spirit. It moves us to look at life differently. To leave off the rose-colored glasses and really see the human condition.”ETC is a shining example.

Founded in 2008 to give voice to actors’ innate talent for character development, Camilla has since produced more than 20 inspired, original performances. Emerging and professional cast and crew have blossomed under her guidance. And together they’ve created profound, can’t-ever-forget shows that illuminate social issues, and transform audience curiosity into concern and action. ETC_Logo_CMYK

Camilla has a deep well of experience and mentorship to tap into for her ETC roles—from her days at Emerson College and then in regional theaters and commercials. Among her favorite portrayals? Capturing the heart, spark, and essence of Harriet Tubman in the one-woman show Harriet Tubman’s Dream. Camilla is also deeply involved with youth, their visions for social change, and the desire to see the world as a stage of peace. To that end, she’s a tireless advocate for children and adults with Asperger’s Syndrome. She gives kids and teen real-life theatrical experience through ETC’s Summer Youth Program and enlivens their eagerness to learn about the history and genuine heroes through ETC’s school programs. Camilla is a steadfast suicide prevention advocate too, helping teens and adults avoid this tragedy and move forward to a happier, more positive future.

Camilla has taught business courses part-time at Three Rivers Community College since 2005, Sat on the Emerson College Alumni Board for ten years, and is past president of the Connecticut Alumni Chapter. In May 2014 Camilla was honored by the Writer’s Block of New London, Conn., for her past work as an instructor. In June 2013 she was named Woman of The Year by the Women’s Network of Southeastern Connecticut, and she’s been featured in many periodicals for her community service. In 2019 Emerson Theater Collaborative was nominated as Collaborator of the year in Sedona AZ. A veteran of the U.S. Navy and member of Kappa Beta Delta, Camilla earned her BA in Performing Arts: Acting from Emerson College in 1985 and her MBA in Finance from Baker College in Michigan.

Connect with Camilla on LinkedIn and follow ETC on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Karen-Loomis-on-Business-RadioXKaren Loomis, Oracle and Founder of No Moss Brands, is no stranger to the impact of racism; not only in her personal life, but professional life as well. In 2000, Karen moved from Spokane, Wa to Phoenix, AZ to find better opportunities as promised by the fifth largest city in the U.S. With only 2% AA, Spokane proved to be a challenging environment, as is Phoenix, with only 6% AA.

Karen has never shied away from the many barriers racism presented. She has always felt her extensive education and professional experiences could overcome these often invisible challenges.Unfortunately, institutional racism has proven to be too big of a hurdle for one person to take on. Using No Moss Brands as the vehicle, Karen will use her voice to open the eyes of others who are willing to join all People of Color on this journey to change. You in?

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn and follow No Moss Brands on Twitter and Facebook.

Inspiring Women, Episode 24:  Strategies For Success Using Your Own Leadership Style

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Betty Collins, Brady Ware
Inspiring Women PodCast with Betty Collins
Inspiring Women, Episode 24:  Strategies For Success Using Your Own Leadership Style
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Betty Collins, Brady Ware
Betty Collins, Brady Ware & Company

Inspiring Women, Episode 24:  Strategies For Success Using Your Own Leadership Style

As host Betty Collins explains, successful leadership requires a mix of knowing your values, understanding your strengths, and defining your uniqueness. This edition of “Inspiring Women” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Betty’s Show Notes

What does successful leadership look like? There’s so many definitions out there, but we’re well aware we’re desperate for good leadership.

When you look at successful leadership, you look at people who are pretty open and honest; good communication skills; they connect with that team member; they encourage personal and professional growth; they don’t just think that they are the only ones that should be learning and doing.

They make others better around them for sure, keeping that positive attitude. Nothing worse than working for a downer, right?

They teach employees instead of giving orders. It’s a huge, huge mindset. Some people just don’t have that ability, but that’s a successful leader. That’s what they look like.

But what about your own style in your leadership? Not everyone should be doing it the same. If you’re going to be a good leader, and you’re trying to be somebody else, you’re probably not going to be effective. You’ve got to find your style in the midst of all of it.

You’ve got to know your values. They’re traits upon which your reputation is built. They affect how you will consciously and subconsciously lead.

You’ve got to know what your strengths are. Chances are, you’re a leader because you have those certain strengths. A lot of times those strengths, too, are your weaknesses, so you have to be careful, but leverage them.

You’ve got to define your uniqueness. What sets you apart? Why are you so special?

What are your true-to-the-core motivations? In fact, what would people say you’re motivated by? When you’re figuring out your style, find out your motivation. Then, you’ve got to observe the leaders and peers around you. Who do you admire right now? Who do you look up to? But you’ve got to be you at the same time. It’s not that impossible.

Successful leadership is all about influence. It’s having followers and getting it done. But doing it on your terms, with your style, is even better. It’s the only way to do it.

Betty Collins, CPA, Brady Ware & Company and Host of the “Inspiring Women” Podcast

Betty Collins, Brady Ware & Company

Betty Collins is the Office Lead for Brady Ware’s Columbus office and a Shareholder in the firm. Betty joined Brady Ware & Company in 2012 through a merger with Nipps, Brown, Collins & Associates. She started her career in public accounting in 1988. Betty is co-leader of the Long Term Care service team, which helps providers of services to Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and nursing centers establish effective operational models that also maximize available funding. She consults with other small businesses, helping them prosper with advice on general operations management, cash flow optimization, and tax minimization strategies.

In addition, Betty serves on the Board of Directors for Brady Ware and Company. She leads Brady Ware’s Women’s Initiative, a program designed to empower female employees, allowing them to tap into unique resources and unleash their full potential.  Betty helps her colleagues create a work/life balance while inspiring them to set and reach personal and professional goals. The Women’s Initiative promotes women-to-women business relationships for clients and holds an annual conference that supports women business owners, women leaders, and other women who want to succeed. Betty actively participates in women-oriented conferences through speaking engagements and board activity.

Betty is a member of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) and she is the President-elect for the Columbus Chapter. Brady Ware also partners with the Women’s Small Business Accelerator (WSBA), an organization designed to help female business owners develop and implement a strong business strategy through education and mentorship, and Betty participates in their mentor match program. She is passionate about WSBA because she believes in their acceleration program and matching women with the right advisors to help them achieve their business ownership goals. Betty supports the WSBA and NAWBO because these organizations deliver resources that help other women-owned and managed businesses thrive.

Betty is a graduate of Mount Vernon Nazarene College, a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and a member of the Ohio Society of Certified Public Accountants. Betty is also the Board Chairwoman for the Gahanna Area Chamber of Commerce, and she serves on the Board of the Community Improvement Corporation of Gahanna as Treasurer.

“Inspiring Women” Podcast Series

“Inspiring Women” is THE podcast that advances women toward economic, social and political achievement. The show is hosted by Betty Collins, CPA, and presented by Brady Ware and Company. Brady Ware is committed to empowering women to go their distance in the workplace and at home. Other episodes of “Inspiring Women” can be found here.

Show Transcript

Betty Collins: Today, we’re going to talk about strategies for success with your own leadership style. What does successful leadership look like? There’s so many definitions out there, but we’re well aware we’re desperate for good leadership. When you look at successful leadership, you look at people who are pretty open and honest; good communication skills; they connect with that team member; they encourage personal and professional growth; they don’t just think that they are the only ones that should be learning and doing. They make others better around them for sure, keeping that positive attitude. Nothing worse than working for a downer, right? They teach employees instead of giving orders. It’s a huge, huge mindset. Some people just don’t have that ability, but that’s a successful leader. That’s what they look like.

Betty Collins: Chances are they’re going to set clear goals with their employees, definitely expectations. People would rather know, “I’ve got to run up the hill today,’ rather than, “Well, let’s just see where we’re going to go.” Running up the hill doesn’t sound fun to me, but at least it’s clear, and I got it, and I know that’s what’s expected. Chances are they’re going to ask for feedback, as they are leader. That’s not always easy to take because you’re always going to have somebody with an opinion. A successful leader definitely looks like they’re open to new ideas. They understand their own motivation. By the way, the others around you know, probably, what you’re motivated by, so you’d better be careful with it. Good, successful leadership, they focus on impact, not just for themselves, but the whole team. They go even further. It’s about the whole organization.

Betty Collins: Those are things that successful leadership looks like, but what about your own style in your leadership? Not everyone should be doing it the same. If you’re going to being a good leader, and you’re trying to be somebody else, you’re probably not going to be effective. You’ve got to find your style in the midst of all of it. You’ve got to know your personality traits, right? I live in a very technical world at Brady Ware. It’s generally not a personable world, where I live. That happens to be something that is my strength. I can relate to people. I can talk with people. I have to be taking that style of leadership and applying it. It sets me apart. You’ve got to know a little bit about your personality. I’m not a technical person. If you had me sit in front of a computer all day, I’d be pretty tired. But, you know what? Accounting needs technicians, and entrepreneurs need advisors. Those are two very different things. So, as I understand who I am and what I’m best at, I really fit in that nice ‘entrepreneurs need advisors’ category. When you’re finding your style, you’ve got to understand those things.

Betty Collins: You’ve got to know your values. They affect how you will consciously and subconsciously lead. In my prior firm, I had a partner for many years who valued work flexibility. Well, his work flexibility … He would come in, 9:00, 9:30-ish, in that timeframe, because he enjoyed breakfast with his kids and driving them to school. Great. For the people who wanted to come in at 7:00 and leave by 4:00, he didn’t have the same respect for them, necessarily. He didn’t really value flex time because he didn’t hesitate to sit, while they were packing up their bags and even walk out to the door with them and to their car. Values are really important. No matter what you say … I love flex time … Not that that’s a value necessarily, but it’s my example. You only really enjoy flex time if you allow the others around you; you really don’t only believe it for yourself. He didn’t believe it for the employees that were there.

Betty Collins: Values, they’re traits upon which your reputation is built. I had another situation, where always talked about church, and faith, and family. That’s great, and his reputation was very, very much like that. But the close circle around him also knew that he was having an affair. So, everything that he was talking about, all those traits his reputation was built on, meant nothing. You’ve got to know your values. You can gauge someone’s personality and understand how that person thinks when you understand what they value. You really do. If my past person would have understood that the people who came in at 7:00, who wanted to leave by 3:00 because they also had families, if he would have understood they also were thinking just like him; his was just morning time, and theirs were evening. You’ve got to know that.

Betty Collins: Core values, the real core stuff – respect, impact, being authentic, courage, and integrity – those are the things that you take and put that into your style. How other ways do you find your style? Well, you’ve got to know what your strengths are. You’ve really got to look back, and go, “These are my strengths.” By the way, I would get a second opinion to make sure that those are really your strengths, because when you’re trying to find your own style, I’m going to lead completely different than my partner since 1995. We just are two very, very different people.

Betty Collins: His strengths are details, and his strengths are making sure, and driving, and all those things. My strengths were totally talking with people. “Where do you think we are? How do you think we can do this?” I just had a different approach. That was my strength. I could listen. He was more of a telling guy. There’s a time for both of those things, but you’ve got to know those strengths, and, again, get a second, maybe third opinion to make sure they really are your strength. There’s nothing worse than seeing a leader think they know how to do something, and they think it’s really good, and it’s not.

Betty Collins: Chances are, you’re a leader because you have those certain strengths. A lot of times those strengths, too, are your weaknesses, so you have to be careful. What I found at Brady Ware, truly, was as I began to really like that, hey, I’m not this technical crazy person. I’m really about entrepreneurship and advising. I’m really a personable person. I realized, too, that I started uptapping different strengths within me that have helped me be a better CPA, and they’ve helped me be a better business advisor. You’re going to have to look in … I really went through the book of, “What’s You’re Why?” by Simon Sinek. That totally changed my entire way I started doing business, how I started treating people, how I started leading. I took the “know your why” thing, which most accountants would not, and I applied that to: hey, these are my these are my characteristics and strengths that I could use and totally set myself apart.

Betty Collins: So, know those strengths, but know your weaknesses and leverage them. What does that mean? Well, when you know your weaknesses, they will affect your leadership style. Don’t be stubborn and prideful and go, “I’ve got this!” Instead, be transparent. It speaks volumes to your team, speaks volumes to your company. By the way, the people already know this about you, that you have these weaknesses … So, overcome them, great, or just realize you’re not going to and make sure you have a team member who can compensate that around you. That’s finding your style. It’s okay that you’re not going to do this part of the leadership because it’s probably not going to go well.

Betty Collins: You’ve got to define your uniqueness. What sets you apart? Why are you so special? There’s three tough questions that I think you have to really answer honestly. First one, what do I really do for the people around me? I’ll say it again. What do I really do for the people around me? I had to really think about that. So, what do I do for my team as I’m leading it? Because I kind of have a team within Brady Ware. What am I genuinely passionate about? For sure, the client experience; for sure, small business. I have to take that and go, “Okay, boom …” How does what I do and what am I passionate about- how do you combine that to make a fantastic difference to another person, or another client, or the peers in your office? How do you do that?

Betty Collins: I came across this formula, which I think is hilarious. What I’m just saying can be wrapped up beautifully like this: My brilliance – what I do – plus my passion is your gain. How does that sound? I read that, and went, “That’s perfect!” Really, when you’re defining your uniqueness, it isn’t just that, “Hey, I’m just loud and I talk too much.” I’m not talking about that uniqueness. I’m talking about what sets you apart to add to your success when you’re trying to be a leader, and you’re trying to do it with your own style. What do you do, and what are you passion about, and how are you going to combine those to really have impact? Again, my brilliance plus my passion is your gain. I love it.

Betty Collins: When you’re talking about your own style, you’ve got to come up with a few things. What are your true-to-the-core motivations? In fact, what would people say you’re motivated by? My children, this Mother’s Day, decided to give me a coffee cup, or actually, it was for was my birthday, that was huge. It’s probably, honestly, a half a gallon. On the outside of it, it says, “More.” So, I would say, easily, that my true-to-the-core motivation, according to my children, is I always want more. They got me this big cup; they think they’re so funny.

Betty Collins: Those around you think they probably know what your motivation is, but I would tell you, motivation is the reason behind all of your actions. It’s behind every desire, thought, needs. Hopefully, you can relate to this example. I’m working with a new training client at the gym, and they tell me they want to burn fat, and they want to lose weight. I ask immediately, why? The first answer is usually something like this: “Oh, because I want to be healthy. I want to look better.” So, I continue on. I want to know, why are they really motivated to be here, and that’s a really generic answer. So, I continue on, and I say, “So, why do you want to be healthy and look better?” At this point, they usually get a little embarrassed because, well, why wouldn’t I want to look better? So, at this point, I sit back in my chair, I take a breath, and I try to make them comfortable, but I’m going to dig deeper. I’m going to get to that. “What motivated you to come all the way to the gym, set an appointment with me, and you want to dedicate all this time to losing weight?” Again, I’m not letting them off the hook.

Betty Collins: After some squirming and a few more attempts to brush me off, the truth usually comes out. They might want to lose some fat, but it could be that they haven’t been asked out in a long time. They haven’t had some intimacy. They want to be more attractive. Their parent recently died of obesity that’s related to disease; or maybe they want to have a baby and they have to be healthier. I know, for me, I went through a weight loss this year, and I did have to dig down. I had to get a better reason than I’ve got to get on a diet; I can’t do this. Part of my reasoning, really, at the end of the day, was twofold. I have a grandson who I want to keep up with, and I have 10 more years to work. I’m very healthy, and I have so many people around me who are not. I have this gift, so, I’m motivated to take care of it.

Betty Collins: What are your true-to-the-core motivations? I mean, not just weight loss – everybody can do that – but in business, as you want to be that successful leader, as you want to do it with your own style, you really have to ask what those motivations are, and you have to keep digging deeper til you get to the real ones. Then, the people around you that you’re leading, probably, will follow differently. So, keep asking why til get to the truth. I’ve got to make money. Okay, why do you have to make money?

Betty Collins: Honestly, probably, one of the biggest time periods of my career in accounting was when I had the motivation to put my children through college. I did not work harder than those years because I wanted them to have that experience, and I didn’t have a lot of time. So, you’ve got to get to that. My core motivation- I rose up, and I became much more of a leader. I needed people to follow me to be successful. It’s just a point I want- when you’re figuring out your style, find out your motivation. Then, you’ve got to observe the leaders and peers around you. I mean, who do you admire right now? Who do you look up to? But you’ve got to be you at the same time. It’s not that impossible.

Betty Collins: Strategies to bring success and style together- we’re talking about leading success, whatever you put your success in. Then, I want to do it on my terms. By the way, if you think, “I’m really not a leader,” you are. We all lead. You’ve got to do continual assessment of where you are. Disengagement and stagnant? Man, game over, if there’s no new players or plays, right? I would tell you, a continual assessment is key to success. Try something different. Don’t do the norm. Is this part of your style now? You should maybe try these things. You’ve got to pay attention to the people around you that you’re trying to lead and not just be talking and telling. You’ve got to provide purpose and sense of belonging.

Betty Collins: One of the things I really emphasize with the team that I work with is not so much: did we get this done? Did we meet the deadline? It’s did the client get served? That’s a different purpose. Strategies to bring that success and style together … Also, you’ve got to try sometimes just some radical transparency. I’m not telling you to tell your story and divulge everything, but secrecy can really create a basis of mistrust. When you just put enough cards on the table just to get by instead of just putting it all out there, it can do a lot of mistrust and confusion.

Betty Collins: Then, another thing we don’t see a lot today – this is not of the norm – is what can I do for you? What can I do for you to make this day easier? What can I do for you to make sure this gets done? I’m not an admin person, but if I need to do admin work to make it easier to get where we need to go, I’m going to do it. Then, you’ve got to create a safe place. Those are different things that you don’t see a lot when you’re talking about your style, and leadership, and success, because those are more things about you giving than, “This is my team, and I’m going to run this, and I’m going to lead.” So, think about those things.

Betty Collins: Another strategy is just honest feedback from you. If you’ve got to have those conversations in your head, it’s okay. Maybe from your team, from your peers, certainly from mentors. Feedback is huge. Another strategy is recognize signs of poor leadership strategy. What does that mean? If nobody on your team has criticized you about one of your ideas in the past month, you probably don’t have any ideas. You really need to think about that. You maybe need to spend more time planning your own career progression than theirs. Their career is theirs; yours is yours. Poor leadership generally is trying to direct somebody so that they are doing what you want them to do. Poor signs of leadership: you haven’t had at least three completely non-work-related conversations with your team members. When’s the last time you heard about the kids and another things?

Betty Collins: I had this client who, part of their leadership strategy – he was the CFO – is how you approach people. I went into his office, and it said, “Before we talk business, I want to do these things. Ask me about my wife and my kids.” That was a top priority for him. That’s a good sign of someone who’s successful. Your team members, if they’re afraid to fail and live in fear, you’ve got some work to do. You’ve got some poor leadership strategy that’s not happening. I would tell you to recognize those signs and look around.

Betty Collins: You know what? You don’t know everything. In fact, you don’t know what you don’t know. When you want to succeed, one of the strategies – you especially want to succeed with your style, right? – ask yourself, how is this working? If you’re drawing a blank, it’s probably not working. I had somebody who was so funny; they kept talking about wanting to be a spiritual person. He’s Muslim, and he was reading the Koran. I said, “So, why aren’t you spiritual? You’re reading the Koran,” and he said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Well, is it working for you?” He goes, “It really isn’t.” I said, “You might want to read something else, you know?” The strategy comes back to how is it working? You really assess that and say, “I’ve got to do something different.” We all know what the definition of insanity is, right? You keep doing the same things over.

Betty Collins: Here’s one of the things that you have to … If you feel like you’re not being taken serious, what’s the strategy? Well, here’s what I would tell you. If you don’t want to end up at the circus, stop acting like a clown. Two great examples of this is Susan Boyle. Love her voice. She was on America’s Got Talent with Simon. I remember watching that, when she came out on stage. She looked completely- she didn’t own the stage. She came out just goofy. She had no presence. She mumbled around. Of course, the judges are all looking … We don’t know what’s reality TV and what isn’t. Then, she sang. Wow. I mean, everyone was mesmerized. For her- there’s a lot of singers. It takes beyond just being talented.

Betty Collins: Now, you see her, it’s nothing like that. She went through a whole thing. It was a big appearance, and her demeanor, and how she talked, and unfortunately … I don’t know why I always remember her coming out like that. Then you look at how far she came because she got the right direction; she got the right guidance. So, if you want to be taken seriously, sometimes you have to do that. Obviously, she did that. She also won a million dollars, and she’s probably beyond. But I will just never forget, how would anyone take her seriously? Now, when she sang, they took her seriously.

Betty Collins: Then I think of another singer, Aretha Franklin, who’s really my favorite. I watched her sing to President Obama, and her stage presence, her talent was like she was 20; yet she’s in her 70s. She had a lifetime of experience and she showed it. It was a completely different thing. I hadn’t really seen any clips of her, or I haven’t been that interested in her. Now, of course, everything’s on YouTube and Facebook. So, my first seeing of her really singing like that, I was like, wow. I don’t have a bad impression or anything, but I took her seriously because she owned the stage from the time she got on there.

Betty Collins: So, if you want to be taken seriously as a leader, even if you have … Susan Boyle’s style was just to kind of be goofy and come out and do her thing and then, she just figured singing would be enough. Now, in her case, it was because she was beyond talented. Successful leadership, at the end of the day, it’s all about influence. It’s having followers and getting it done but doing it on your terms with your style is even better. It’s the only way to do it.

Decision Vision Episode 78:  Should I Join a Non-Profit Board? – An Interview with Cindy Cheatham, Good Advisors

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join a non-profit board
Decision Vision
Decision Vision Episode 78:  Should I Join a Non-Profit Board? - An Interview with Cindy Cheatham, Good Advisors
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Decision Vision Episode 78:  Should I Join a Non-Profit Board? – An Interview with Cindy Cheatham, Good Advisors

Cindy Cheatham of Good Advisors joins host Mike Blake to explore the issues to consider as one decides whether to join a non-profit board. “Decision Vision” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Cindy Cheatham, President, Good Advisors

Good Advisors LLC, is an independent management consulting organization led by Cindy Cheatham focused on strategic and business planning, board development, and organizational development for a diverse range of national, regional and local nonprofits and social-impact minded businesses.   

Ms. Cheatham is very passionate about her work, always seeking to advance the impact of the clients she serves both during and after her engagements.

Prior to Good Advisors, Ms. Cheatham  served as the VP of Consulting for the Georgia Center for Nonprofits where she led and oversaw work with foundations and hundreds of nonprofits.  She also served as Venture Catalyst at Georgia Tech’s ATDC  where she advised entrepreneurs and worked to build the entrepreneurial ecosystem.   Ms. Cheatham began her consulting career with leading management consultancy Bain & Company 

Ms. Cheatham is a frequent speaker on topics including leadership and succession, strategic and business planning, governance, collaborations and partnerships, nonprofit business models , social enterprise and entrepreneurship.  She has developed and facilitated award-winning leadership programs. 

Ms. Cheatham is active in the community where she serves as an elder of North Avenue Presbyterian Church. She has been a leader in a variety of Dekalb County Schools .  Ms. Cheatham is a 2010 fellow of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (GPEE) Policy Fellowship Program. 

She is a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tarheel Honors Graduate and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.  

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Mike Blake, Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series

Michael Blake is Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series and a Director of Brady Ware & Company. Mike specializes in the valuation of intellectual property-driven firms, such as software firms, aerospace firms and professional services firms, most frequently in the capacity as a transaction advisor, helping clients obtain great outcomes from complex transaction opportunities. He is also a specialist in the appraisal of intellectual properties as stand-alone assets, such as software, trade secrets, and patents.

Mike has been a full-time business appraiser for 13 years with public accounting firms, boutique business appraisal firms, and an owner of his own firm. Prior to that, he spent 8 years in venture capital and investment banking, including transactions in the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company is a regional full-service accounting and advisory firm which helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality. Brady Ware services clients nationally from its offices in Alpharetta, GA; Columbus and Dayton, OH; and Richmond, IN. The firm is growth minded, committed to the regions in which they operate, and most importantly, they make significant investments in their people and service offerings to meet the changing financial needs of those they are privileged to serve. The firm is dedicated to providing results that make a difference for its clients.

Decision Vision Podcast Series

“Decision Vision” is a podcast covering topics and issues facing small business owners and connecting them with solutions from leading experts. This series is presented by Brady Ware & Company. If you are a decision maker for a small business, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at decisionvision@bradyware.com and make sure to listen to every Thursday to the “Decision Vision” podcast.

Past episodes of “Decision Vision” can be found at decisionvisionpodcast.com. “Decision Vision” is produced and broadcast by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX®.

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Show Transcript

Intro: [00:00:01] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional full service accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:21] And welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast giving you, the listener, clear vision to make great decisions. In each episode, we discuss the process of decision making on a different topic from the business owner’s or executive’s perspective. We aren’t necessarily telling you what to do, but we can put you in a position to make an informed decision on your own and understand when you might need help along the way.

Mike Blake: [00:00:40] My name is Mike Blake and I’m your host for today’s program. I’m a director at Brady Ware & Company, a full service accounting firm based in Dayton, Ohio. With offices in Dayton, Columbus, Ohio, Richmond, Indiana, and Alpharetta, Georgia. Brady Ware is sponsoring this podcast, which is being recorded in Atlanta for social distancing protocols. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast aggregator and please consider leaving a review of the podcast as well.

Mike Blake: [00:01:07] Today’s topic is, should I accept a nonprofit board position? And, you know, this is a trickier topic than, I think, maybe some people appreciate. And a lot of it, I think, depends on kind of what stage of life, what stage of career you’re on. When I was 20 years younger and I did not yet have two arthritic ankles and gray hair, you know, I’d be inclined to accept almost any kind of board position because, one, I was stunned that anybody wanted me. And number two, that I would want to – that’s a great way to build professional experience, to build a network, to build certain skills. We’re going to talk about that later today.

Mike Blake: [00:01:58] But as one kind of advances in life and in one’s career and has, frankly, more choices and more demands on their time, the discussion of deciding whether or not to join a nonprofit board, I think, becomes a lot more complex. And, you know, some people may find out that they’re not particularly good board members. One of the things I’ve figured out over my career, I’m really not a great board member. I do my share for nonprofits, but I’m a better kind of rank and file person than I am a board member. I’m more effective when I get out there doing stuff rather than planning the stuff. But that’s not me. As we’re going to find out, the doing and the planning are equally valuable, but they’re different skill sets.

Mike Blake: [00:02:50] And joining a nonprofit board should be a very seriously taken decision. And the decision may not simply be to join a board, but which board do you join? Chances are you will have multiple opportunities at once that come up. And being able to sift through kind of whether or not to take on multiple opportunities, or how one opportunity is a better fit than another, or whether to do it at all is an important decision.

Mike Blake: [00:03:23] And we have a terrific guest to come on to talk exactly about that. And it’s my friend, Cindy Cheatham, who is president of Good Advisors. And I’ll get to her formal introduction in just a second. But Cindy and I have known each other for more years than we probably cared to admit to one another. But we both kind of grew up a little bit in the Atlanta startup community. And that’s where we both met. And then, several years ago she kind of branched off into nonprofit support and consulting work. And I’ve done my thing in corporate finance and now decision science. But that’s kind of where we both kind of intersect. And I don’t think that’s by accident.

Mike Blake: [00:04:11] I think in Atlanta – I think in any thriving startup ecosystem, you almost have to have a nonprofit mentality to be successful, especially in Atlanta ten, fifteen years ago, where we did not have any kind of thriving venture capital ecosystem. It was very much a work in progress. And it wasn’t progressing very far or very fast at the time. And Cindy may disagree, but from my perspective, you know, serving the startup ecosystem was almost like serving on a nonprofit board or serving in a nonprofit capacity. I think it draws that kind of mentality. And I think it’s interesting now how that kind of comes full circle, at least, in terms of our relationship and where we’ve bumped into each other over the years.

Mike Blake: [00:05:04] Good Advisors is an independent management consulting organization focused on serving diverse organizations, including nonprofits, social enterprises, and entrepreneurial businesses. And we recently recorded a podcast on benefit corporation. So, in fact, that was published last week as I record this episode on July 31st, so check that out. They provide strategic consulting in areas of planning, organizational development and effectiveness, governance collaborations and partnerships, and leadership coaching. They also provide customer retreat, facilitation, training, and workshops using experience as a certified facilitator and development of award winning practical adult education programs. Their particular strengths include ability to bring strength and analytics with excellence in working with people and organizations to accomplish goals and to undertake successful change initiatives.

Mike Blake: [00:05:56] Cindy helps motivate, lead, and equip mission minded leaders and organizations to achieve their full potential by developing and sharpening their strategy, strengthening their leaders, launching new products or services, growing revenue, and forming strategic partnerships. Cindy is particularly skilled at working with people in organizations who conceptualize a future and lead them through a process of planning and change. She’s a very quick learner and is able to quickly assess an organization while also bringing objectivity to the work to design a practical yet innovative plan or solution for a diverse range of clients.

Mike Blake: [00:06:31] Cindy takes a value-added approach, always seeking to use her network of business associates and leaders to facilitate valuable connections on behalf of her clients. Cindy is passionate about helping her clients to get great results for themselves and their organizations. Oh, and by the way, she has an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and a Harvard MBA. So, definitely on the far right of the bell curve in terms of IQ. Cindy, welcome to the program.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:06:58] Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. And yeah, I resonate very much. I always tell people that I used to work with cash-strapped change the world startups. And now, I’m working with change the world cash-strapped nonprofits. So, you and I are on the same page there.

Mike Blake: [00:07:14] It’s like slipping from one old pair of shoes into another, right? So, as we always do or we typically do on the show, let’s set a baseline here. What is a nonprofit board and why do nonprofit boards exist?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:07:32] Yes. Well, there are different types of organizations as we know, private businesses, government, public organizations. And nonprofit is one of the types that the government has created a tax status for and has a regulatory framework for. What we particularly, probably, think about when we think about nonprofit boards is the 501(c)(3), which is the charitable model where the IRS is giving those nonprofits the benefit of not paying taxes as well as securing and taking donations. And the donors get a tax deduction in return.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:08:08] There are also 501(c)(6) that most of us, as business leaders and professionals, we are part of associations. So, those are different. 501(c)(6) nonetheless are a type of nonprofit. But the ones I think we’re mostly talking about today are the charitable 501(c)(3).

Cindy Cheatham: [00:08:26] And it’s a legal responsibility. I like the fact that you said that this is a serious decision because I think a lot of people don’t take it as seriously as they should. You are legally responsible for being the fiduciary of the nonprofit’s mission success. That’s why the government has created that. It’s a public good and you have the duty of care, loyalty, and obligation as a board member.

Mike Blake: [00:08:50] And you mentioned something about a 501(c)(6) and not as many people, I think, are familiar with it because it’s really not the big name. But as you know and some of our listeners know, I started or co-founded and then ran a nonprofit called Startup Lounge, which helps entrepreneurs go from idea to venture to business. And we had a pretty good ten year run. And as we were forming that, the best advice we ever received was not to do a (C)(3) but instead to do a (C)(6). Because, you know, we were doing it, as Scott Burkett, our guest in Episode 2, he would readily admit we were a couple of knuckleheads who didn’t know what we were doing. All we wanted to do was to execute a mission. And the oversight for a (C)(3) is so much greater than that for a (C)(6), which is almost non-existent. It was the perfect fit for us. But until we got that advice, we hadn’t even heard of it. And, really, it was great advice that we got.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:09:50] Yeah. Good. Good choice.

Mike Blake: [00:09:54] So, when we think or we bring up the term nonprofit board, I think if you’re not familiar with it, one’s mind can then think to something with which you are familiar with, which is a corporate board. Are they very similar things or are they very different kind of animals?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:10:12] Well, they’re both similar in that they have governance responsibilities. Legally, they both can be sued. Ideally, they both are adding value to the entity through their strategic partnering with, typically, the executive. A good executive board relationship is key to a successful board. There’s similar attributes of the most effective corporate boards to nonprofit boards asking tough questions, not just being consensus driven. But a lot of the practices of the culture of boards that make for effective boards are similar.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:10:51] But they’re quite different in that nonprofit board members are supposed to go in there and they’re legally responsible for not having self-interest. They have to sign conflicts of interest. And nonprofit boards tend to operate more from consensus. For-profit boards can sometimes operate that way, but a lot of times for-profit board – sorry – for-profit boards can have investors who have a stake directly. They can have majority control. Both of them can have issues between executive and CEO. But don’t get me wrong, there’s challenges of managing that relationship among both. But for-profit boards, also, frankly, I think in many ways have an easier job of measuring success.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:11:37] Bottom line, financial success metrics are easier for the nonprofit board who’s trying to understand how do we measure success in a mission that’s very difficult. We all know there’s a lot of difficult problems out there. How do we take somebody who’s abused and turn their lives around? How do we get more equity in America? These are difficult problems and these nonprofit boards have a more difficult lens in terms of being responsible for understanding how to achieve a mission goal and having the right measurement tools to do so. No easier bottom line in the nonprofit world.

Mike Blake: [00:12:19] So, you brought up something that I want to follow up on. So, we’re right on schedule. I’m going to rip up the script already. If somebody is going to join a nonprofit board for the first time and they have experience interacting with or maybe sitting on a corporate or company board, do board members behave similarly or do they behave differently? And you kind of inferred this, but I really like to hit this directly because I suspect that if you’re not used to a nonprofit and you’ve only dealt with a for-profit, can there be a little bit of culture shock there?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:12:56] Yeah. I mean, I know some corporate boards are very high performing, some are more casual, some are more formal. But I would say as a general rule, probably, the corporate board is probably more formal because just the nature of corporate beans. Kind of nonprofit boards can really vary. They can be extremely corporate in their practices and buttoned up, you know, with their agenda and closely following it depending on the chair. But they can be very casual in nature and very informal in nature, everything in between.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:13:34] So, If a corporate board member is used to everything being buttoned up, you know, all the material sent out weeks and weeks in advance, all well done, very well organized agenda, and everybody having done their homework. Of course, corporate board members in many cases are getting paid to do that work, so that helps. Or they have a personal incentive to do that work. They can go on to a nonprofit board and have a bit of culture shock for a variety of reasons.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:14:04] One is because it doesn’t sometimes always operate as formally and professionally. And that is not always as clear and available too. Frankly, a lot of times they don’t do their homework. You know, they go in with more casualness to the prep and the commitment that they make. Which frustrates the heck out of me when I see these great corporate people just come and show up to a board meeting and not taking it seriously. So, there’s different reasons for that.

Mike Blake: [00:14:32] Now, I’ve encountered a term and I suspect you’re familiar with it, too, that talks about three different kinds of roles that individual board members often serve. And it’s referred to and, at least, I’ve heard it as sort of the three W’s, which is wisdom, work, and wealth. Have you heard of something like that as well? And if so, can you talk about what those things mean?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:14:58] Yeah. Absolutely. Whether you call it wisdom, work, and wealth or time, talent, wealth, absolutely. Yeah, I try to break it down into the three hats. One is on the wisdom side, it’s the strategy lens. You know, you’re responsible for helping to shape a strategy of a nonprofit along with the executive to shape the funding strategy, to shape the mission strategy, and bring your wisdom of your field or your professionalism to that role.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:15:30] On the talent side, again, a nonprofit board should ideally have a mix of the different talent, whether it be the marketing talent, the legal talent, the business development. We always need salespeople that are willing to knock down doors and open up doors for recruiting board members, for opening up doors to donors. So, that’s on the talent side. And that ideally gets deployed by your committee work or taking on a pro bono. Sometimes, you know, nonprofits are run by board members who literally are the marketing. Small nonprofits have their boards running the operations. That’s not the ideal. You know, you have to be careful in a larger board that the board member keeps their lane and doesn’t get into the daily operations of the nonprofit. But they usually do their talent through the committee.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:16:24] And then, the time. Time is rolling up your sleeves and literally going and showing up. When we’re not in a pandemic and we actually get together for fundraising events, or tours, or events, program events, board members should show up to some of those events and have a presence. They should be a spokesperson and they should be out there opening up doors with their time.

Mike Blake: [00:16:51] So, what I take from that is a lot of times when we think about who serves on a board, we think that, “Oh, wow. You have to be a big time donor or a big time influencer, corporate giant, something like that, to serve in a nonprofit board.” It doesn’t sound like that’s necessarily the case, is it?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:17:11] No. It really, really varies. There’s a lot of different types of boards. The high museum board, you know, is certainly a board that does tend to be seeking the C levels, CEOs and people with a lot of wealth. But even there, they have their executive board and then they have, you know, the larger, larger board. But the vast, vast majority of nonprofits, they need some wealth, ideally. And they need a handful of people that are willing to at least help organize the board’s role in fundraising. But what they mostly need are people willing to not just show up to meetings, but to actually help be a team leader, whether it be an officer or a committee chair.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:17:59] And so, I worked with the Federal Reserve in placing people on boards. And one of my favorite board members that’s become the chair of two different boards that I placed him on, he always says, “You know, the Federal Reserve doesn’t have a big corporate foundation behind us. So, I know that I have to give leadership. That on my role, I can write my small check or my modest check, but what I know I can bring is leadership to a board.” And sure enough, he’s risen to chair because he’s demonstrated and been willing to go in as an officer and provide that critical leadership.

Mike Blake: [00:18:37] Now, is it a prerequisite that if you’re recruited for a nonprofit board or maybe you, yourself, want to approach and join or see if there’s an opportunity to join, is it a prerequisite that you have to already be a subject matter expert? Let’s just take for example, the ALS Association, which is a charity near and dear to my heart. Would I have to be an expert in Lou Gehrig’s disease to be considered for a board? Or is that not necessarily either a qualifying or disqualifying criteria?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:19:18] It’s definitely not a criteria. What is important, I think – one of the number one things that I think is important is that the individual joining does have a passion and/or at least a strong interest. If they’re doing it in part because the networking opportunity or in part because their corporation says, “Hey, this is a cause we support and we need somebody to represent,” which frequently happens. You know, Cox or others say we support environmental causes. We support these education causes. We need somebody to serve on the JA board, you know, Junior Achievement. So, it can be a combination. But passion and interest is important. So, if you really can’t get excited about the mission of the organization, either because you don’t have personal experience or expertise, I would think twice.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:20:05] But no, you don’t need to be an expert. It is helpful for every board to have one or two people that can relate to the mission, either because their family member has Lou Gehrig’s, their child has it. That really does fuel a lot of passion and commitment. And some of our best nonprofits were founded because of the personal experience of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. You know, that’s how a lot of these things get started. But it’s not essential. And frankly, you need diverse thinking on a board. You don’t want everybody to come from the same experience and have the same perspective. You need different thinkers.

Mike Blake: [00:20:47] Corporate board members are often compensated. What about nonprofit board members, are nonprofit board members typically compensated in any way?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:20:55] No. You know, they can sometimes get their expenses reimbursed for travel and so forth. I rarely ever see that. Maybe some of the larger nonprofits that have people gathering, national ones that have people having to travel all across the country occasionally. But for the most part, people just pay for that themselves. Their compensation is in the goodwill of doing good and in the relationships. One of the reasons people most join a board is also the opportunity for the relationships that they form with fellow board members and colleagues, the collegiality, the sense of doing good, the learning that they have that may be different from the way that things work in their organization. Having a different perspective of decision making, collaboration, working in a more diverse environment than where they may come from. So, it’s really all those learnings and the relationships and then the sense of doing good, that’s their compensation.

Mike Blake: [00:21:55] Now, other than doing good and serving a cause that I believe in, for example, are there other benefits to joining a nonprofit board?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:22:06] I mean, absolutely. You know, like I said, relationships and networking, not everybody values the network as much as I do. But I know it’s kind of a pay it forward when you have a network of people that you’ve worked with well in your life. Frankly, with my business, I barely even got a website. It’s kind of embarrassing, I think, I got one up about a year or so ago. But it’s all based on my network and referrals from all the various places I’ve worked over the years and people I’ve worked with that have led to the opportunities that I have. And so, you know, people have a life ahead of them, whether it be a new career, a business opportunity, a referral, even getting people to help your kids get internships and so forth.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:22:54] I have a lot of people on boards that are always calling me and saying, “Hey, there’s this young person from UGA who wants to get into nonprofits. Will you help me?” And then, if you want to get into leadership programs like LEAD Atlanta as a young person or Leadership Atlanta, you have to have a track record of community leadership. So, for example, with the Federal Reserve, some of their young high potentials, they come to me and say, “Hey, can you help this person find a good board where they can find a passion and a fit and gain community leadership experience?”

Cindy Cheatham: [00:23:25] Because, one, we believe in doing that because we need to get outside of our four walls and see how the community is doing and to see the economic health. And two, we want our leaders to be in a position to further lead and to be candidates for LEAD Atlanta and Leadership Atlanta, for example.

Mike Blake: [00:23:47] Now, what about building new skills? Can you learn skills from a nonprofit that you can then take back to your life in the for-profit world?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:23:57] Absolutely. Not everybody has, for example, been part of strategic planning or had the chance to be part of a strategic planning committee. Because they might be a bean counter or an accountant. Or even if you’re an accountant, you may not have done fund accounting before. There’s the learning around just – there’s just different types of problems and problem solving. If you’re used to a very corporate decision making environment and the nonprofit you’re in is more of a shared – you know, there’s not as much – it depends on the nonprofit but a lot of nonprofits are less hierarchical in nature. And so, the world is moving to be less hierarchical. So, even just the way that you collaborate to get things done and make decisions together can be a learning exercise from your work in nonprofit.

Mike Blake: [00:24:58] Now, a question, I think, that follows from that is, if I’m considering joining a nonprofit board, is it okay for me to consider kind of what’s in it for me? Not from a rich man standpoint financially, but at least from a perspective of how it might help my career, how it might help develop my skill set. Is it okay to consider that in evaluating the opportunity? Or is that considered being opportunistic or too self-centered? Is that a legitimate way to or, at least, a legitimate consideration?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:25:39] Absolutely. And as long as it can be managed so it’s not a conflict of interest, you know, where you’re pushing your own priority and interest within the board operations. I mean, there are even bankers, for example, that do business as a bank, that sit on nonprofit boards. You just have to have practices to make sure you make non-conflicted, that you have competitive processes.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:26:03] But to the extent that there’s learning that you want to do, you know, “Hey, I do this for a day job. I’m in finance, but I really want to have a chance. I’ve never sat on the strategy team of a for-profit before of my business. I really am looking forward to being part of the executive leadership.” That’s a learning. Yeah, absolutely. It makes you more motivated.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:26:31] You know, I’m interviewing somebody for a board right now and this person is a PhD and engineering graduate from Georgia Tech. She has a lot to bring to this particular STEM oriented nonprofit board, but she told me one of her reasons is that she wants to learn. And she just started her own nonprofit and she’s trying to get her feet and her learning undertaken and I think that’s fine. And I appreciate her sharing that that was one of three reasons that she’s interested in this nonprofit board. I think she’ll be more motivated as a result as long as she’s not conflicted and I don’t think there is a conflict there.

Mike Blake: [00:27:14] Now, we touched upon this a little bit earlier, but I do want to hit it directly. And that is that, I think when a lot of people think about joining a nonprofit board, that means they’re automatically going to be on the hook for raising a certain amount of money or sponsoring one or multiple tables at their annual fundraising event or gala. Is that necessarily true? I mean, do you have to kind of come to the table with some significant financial resources to be a viable board member?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:27:47] You know, I highly recommend that the best boards do expect a give and/or get from all their board members. There are some that don’t. And they particularly are ones that maybe have their predominant funding coming from the government, for example. Not all nonprofit funding comes from philanthropy. The predominant income stream, if you add it all up in nonprofit, comes from, one, a lot of fee for services. All the schools in the world that are nonprofits, they charge tuition. Two, government money.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:28:21] But the ones that rely heavily on philanthropy, I always recommend that the nonprofits do ask their board members to be the role models, to be the first to give their time and their talent. But that doesn’t mean it’s a lot. I mean, it can be – but I do recommend it’s a meaningful amount for that particular board member. So, it should be one of your top three to five checks that you stroke, you know, if you’re religious, to your synagogue or your church, to your kid’s school, your university, and then the one or two boards. It should be a meaningful check that then can allow you to then better represent when you’re out there as a spokesperson to help get money to help be able to speak to the reason.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:29:13] I always ask board members, why is this board worth your time and your money? You have to be able to speak to that and be able to give your time and give your money. Otherwise, you could just be a pro bono expert. Sit outside the board, give your expertise as a marketing person, give your expertise as a pro bono accountant.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:29:34] Does that answer your question? But it doesn’t mean that – you know, boards can range from having no dollar amount to as many as – Big Brothers Big Sisters asks for a $10,000 check. So, yes. There are some boards that ask for a lot. I always try to work with board members providing what is your comfort zone, what is something meaningful that you can give, and then match that up to the nonprofit.

Mike Blake: [00:29:59] And my understanding, a big portion, a big piece of that, too, is that potential donors almost always ask, what is your percentage of board participation? Meaning, what percentage of your board members have made themselves a financial contribution? How much financial skin in the game do they have? And it really got to be 100 percent. Anything less than 100 percent does tend to raise a red flag, doesn’t it?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:30:27] Yeah. Not only that, but some of the institutions will ask for the total dollars raised. And they look at that and they’ll then look at the composition of your board. And they don’t expect a lot. If your board is composed – if it’s a grassroots organization in a disadvantaged community with community leaders and pastors and ministers and just community people, they don’t expect necessarily the same dollars as if you were a CEO board.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:30:58] The other thing that people need to realize about nonprofit donations that come from the board, so many dollars out there that come from large institutions, like foundations, are what they call restricted. Restricted means they’re giving you a grant to accomplish a certain program or with certain expectations. Thankfully, not all institutions do that. The community foundation has been a big proponent of non-restricted grants that basically are saying, “Tell us what your overall strategy is and we’re going to trust it. We’re not going to micromanage where you spend.”

Cindy Cheatham: [00:31:37] But a lot of the large grants do have – you know, they’re either funding a particular program or they’re funding like, “Hey, we’re going to help you hire your first fundraiser.” So, the dollars that come from board members are what I consider gold money because it’s unrestricted. It allows the nonprofit to have some of their own control of their own money for their own priorities. Including, “Hey, we actually need to invest in something. Like, we need to hire a fundraising person. We think it can pay off. We don’t have the dollars for that. Otherwise, we think that we can do this.” And sometimes you can even use that to go out and do a challenge grant. You know, a board can say, “Hey, we’re going to raise 30,000. We’re going to go and challenge the community to get another 30,000.”

Mike Blake: [00:32:28] And that brings up a point I want to drill down because it brings up a question that, actually, I never thought of. And that is, because you mentioned that donors not just look at amount of board participation, but actually the dollar amount contributed. And it brings to mind, at least my understanding that, you know, no foundation wants to be overly responsible for the survival of one organization. They don’t want one organization to be so dependent upon them that if they change mission, don’t have as much money themselves to give that year. That all of a sudden, that particular organization is imperiled. So, I like to see diversity of financing sources. Is there a percentage of, sort of a target percentage, if you will, of overall operating budgets they like to see coming from the board in terms of – so, is there a percentage they like to see?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:33:29] You know, again, like I said, if it’s a grassroots organization, that would maybe be – well, it would probably tend to be a smaller budgeted organization. I don’t see that. I’ve never seen that target set. But I do see sometimes boards say, shouldn’t it be closer to ten percent that in total, in aggregate, which usually is driven.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:33:51] It’s good if a board has a couple, what I call, major givers on it. You know, there can be a board that has a bunch of people giving $500 or $1,000. But then, it’s helpful if there’s a handful that are able to get five or ten. And most major givers are then able – they tend to have peers that can give five or ten, right? Their peer network. So, you know, I’ve seen ten percent thrown out there, sometimes five percent. But I think it’s just a point of leverage too. When a board is saying, “Hey, we need to do these things,” and they’re setting strategy and they’re not sure how they’re going to fund it. And sort of you add it up and say, “Well, we think we can get 80 percent of the way there.” That’s a good time to say, “Board, can we step our game up?” I think board members, just like donors, want to see what’s the case for support.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:34:48] And nonprofits need to not just expect board members to give. They need to also be able to communicate why do we need your money even for a board. It shouldn’t just be an expectation. There should still be a process of that board being able to ask questions and feel good about how the nonprofit is using the money and to make a case for why do we need more money. You know, how are our dollars going to help achieve results? And of course, they’re part of shaping that as part of strategy development with the executive director. But if they don’t feel like there’s a reason to write more checks then they need to also self-evaluate. “Well, then why don’t we believe in the mission? Do we not have a future that we’re excited to help make us realize?” If that makes sense? There still need to be a case for support made even with board members, especially if you’re asking them for something more or substantial.

Mike Blake: [00:35:50] Sure. I mean, you can’t go out and advocate for the organization if you, yourself, don’t believe in it and don’t understand it, right? And that’s a reasonable expectation of a board member. Now, let’s say that now a listener has been hanging out with us for, you know, the 35 minutes or so we’ve been on and they’re now seriously considering joining a nonprofit board, maybe accepting an invitation or proactively pursuing one. What is kind of a personal inventory that I might take for myself to determine if I have the right tools or personal characteristics to be a good board member or even if I would find it rewarding?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:36:38] Yeah. Well, I think, you know, have I met one or more of the people in the organization or are there people that I would enjoy working with? Do I have a passion for the cause or an interest? Do I see that there may be a seat or a place for me that I might feel like I could contribute? There’s either – of course, it’s obvious if they need a treasurer and I’m willing to be treasurer. You know, an immediate match in terms of a need that they’re trying to fill. Are the expectations give, get, and/or time? Even the meeting frequency and time, you know, the time of day, are they a morning board or are they an evening board? I mean, I know somebody who was meeting on Friday nights. That have to work in your life.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:37:27] And then, you know, at the end of the day, am I excited? Do I feel like this is going to – you know, it’s a commitment. Am I excited to take on this new challenge and this commitment and feel like it’s – you know, and they have been thoughtful about it, too, and not just, “Hey, somebody grabbed me and said come join this board.” The process of joining the board ideally should be not just, “Hey, Mike asked me to join Board X.” There’s very little exchange of information, very little thoughtfulness.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:38:04] So, I would encourage and urge people to not jump right away, to do some of their homework. Including, like, is there any major crisis going on with this organization? I mean, very few nonprofits are really super, super stable in this pandemic. You know, just like small businesses, nonprofits are particularly vulnerable and that’s always the case. But of course, pandemic makes it worse.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:38:29] But, you know, is the organization – this is not a reason not to join, but at least having clarity. Is there any reserve? What’s the balance sheet look like? Has there been any – you know, have we been operating in the black or the red? How does the board feel about where the board is right now? Or is there some kind of board crisis going on? Is our long time 20 year founder going to all of a sudden retire on day one when I join the board and we’re going to have to do one of the hardest things the board has to do, find a new CEO? Just sort of be eyes wide open to what the current situation is, too, because that can really influence your experience as a board member.

Mike Blake: [00:39:15] We’re talking with Cindy Cheatham of Good Advisors. And we’re discussing the decision point of should I join a nonprofit board. We’ve only got time for a couple more questions, so I want to make sure I get them in because I know we have a little bit of a hard stop here. But one question I do want to make sure we get to is – and we just touched upon it with that last responses – you know, typically with a nonprofit board, what kind of time commitment is the board member typically looking at?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:39:45] Well, it can really vary, but the BoardSource, which is a national consultancy focused on governance does this yearly, would say that an officer can spend as many as six, eight, ten hours a month, a chair especially. But I think on average, four to six hours per month for the board, you know, for a board that’s doing its job, that is kind of doing the wisdom, talent, and wealth. So, you know, it’s not giant, but it’s not unsubstantial as you think about the amount of free time we have relative to exercise, family, and other other commitments that we may have.

Mike Blake: [00:40:26] Now, one thing you touched upon earlier and I want to make sure we get to is, you know, joining a nonprofit board is not like going to community college. It’s a serious commitment. You don’t just sort of sign up and walk in. And one of the things that makes it a serious commitment is that there is real liability if things go south and it’s kind of on your watch. How do do board members manage that liability? Or does the nonprofit help manage that liability? What is the strategy for doing that?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:41:01] Well, the board is responsible for its duty of care, obligation, and so forth to follow the law. And should be responsible to make sure the nonprofit does have policies in place for things like finances, financial controls to prevent fraud, HR policies in terms of whistleblower, nondiscriminatory policies, and so forth. So one, their job is to make sure those policies and practices are in place and to do that audit. But they should also have nonprofit board insurance. There is insurance just like there is for corporate boards. You know, that is an insurance policy.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:41:44] But what I see a lot of times is board members who are particularly sensitive to risk. And a lot of the people that I place at the Federal Reserve are very much risk – you know, they manage risk and they come from finance. And so, they’ll go into a board and ask a lot of questions around the audit and see practices or lack of practices and take leadership in putting those in place. That’s one of the roles of a board is to bring those practices to reduce the liabilities and the risk. So, it’s their job to do it. And then, on the protection side, it’s fair to ask do you have directors and officers insurance? And the vast majority do. And you can go to Georgia Center for Nonprofits and others to secure that relatively inexpensively.

Mike Blake: [00:42:38] Now, let’s go to kind of the other end of the spectrum, let’s say that I really get a lot out of serving on a nonprofit board. And maybe I’m at a point in my life in my career where, you know, I can make a substantial commitment to nonprofit support. Is it possible, or ill advised, or somewhere in between to serve on multiple boards?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:43:03] Oh, absolutely. I would say a good number of community minded leaders that do like that work do find a lot of fulfillment from it and are frankly good at leadership sit on multiple boards. You know, and especially ones that just – yeah. But it’s a big commitment. I always encourage people to think twice, and three, and four times before they do that, especially joining at the same time because there’s always a learning curve of going onto boards.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:43:40] And I had one individual that went on two different boards. One was really very much aligned with the corporate center interest. “This is going to be very good for my career and very much appreciated me serving on this board, because this is right up the alley of my – this is really the business that my bank is in.” So, I’m going to see that board service is really kind of more professional. And the other one was the Ronald McDonald House, which was very, very personal. And so, that’s also common, too, because there are professional boards that you can serve on for some professional purposes. And then, there’s another one that really is just totally kind of melt your heart. “This cause is near and dear to me.” So, he did both of those well, because I think he had strong motivations. And he’s one of those just very organized giving people that can get a lot done in a little bit of time.

Mike Blake: [00:44:36] So, actually that brings up another question I want to touch upon, because I think we can squeeze this in. And that is, if I’m thinking of joining a nonprofit board, what kind of support should I reasonably expect from my employer to allocate the time or allow me the time to just sit on a nonprofit? Or do companies make allowances for that? Do companies recognize that it’s in their best interest to have their employees and their leaders out there serving the community? Or do businesses and employers tend to think of it as the same thing as going fishing that if you want to do this, that’s fine, but it’s a hobby and it’s separate from work

Cindy Cheatham: [00:45:20] Well, I think it varies. I haven’t seen enough of how small more entrepreneurial businesses do this. But I would think that they should – you know, that if they don’t have an established policy or practice for encouraging service or these practices, a lot of corporations, large established corporations, they have policies on amount of service time you can take during the workday. And they have those policies all in practice. They communicate them. They encourage them. They even organize their team based events to help people utilize those community service hours. They have matching gifts to match. You know, if you give a certain number of hours, you can also earn a match and gifts. So, big established companies absolutely encourage – professional service firms, legal, accounting, encourage it because of business development purposes.

Cindy Cheatham: [00:46:17] So, you know, it really varies. And then, of course, just talking to your boss. A lot of times it’s you and your relationship to your direct supervisor in terms of how this is going to impact. If your meetings are always at lunch time or always during the workday, you just have to have a good – even if your corporation encourages it, it’s always good to just kind of give a heads up to your supervisor and get them on board. But some of the best companies, the most thriving, purposeful companies are also encouraging of leadership in the community for both personal satisfaction as well as a corporate benefit. They see the learning. They see the professional development. They see the goodwill that comes when their employees know that their employer is encouraging them to have a life in the community and not just in their building.

Mike Blake: [00:47:13] Cindy, we are unfortunately out of time, as is typically the case. I have a lot more questions that I could ask, but we do need to be respectful of your time. But I’m sure our listeners have other questions they love to follow up with you about. How can people contact you for more information about this topic?

Cindy Cheatham: [00:47:31] Sure. Well, I have a website. It’s www.good, G-O-O-D, and then, dash advisors, A-D-V-I-S-O-R-S.com. And then, cindy@good-advisors.com. I welcome additional questions and opportunities. I really enjoyed this conversation, Mike. And appreciate any time to collaborate with you. Let’s keep it going.

Mike Blake: [00:47:57] All right. Thanks so much. That’s going to wrap it up for today’s program. I’d like to thank Cindy Cheatham so much for joining us and sharing her expertise with us today.

Mike Blake: [00:48:06] We’ll be exploring a new topic each week. So, please tune in so that when you’re faced with your next executive decision, you have clear vision when making it. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider leaving a review with your favorite podcast aggregator. It helps people find us that we can help them. Once again, this is Mike Blake. Our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. And this has been the Decision Vision podcast.

Decision Vision Episode 77:  Should I Get to Know my Employees on a Personal Level? – An Interview with Alain Hunkins

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Alain Hunkins
Decision Vision
Decision Vision Episode 77:  Should I Get to Know my Employees on a Personal Level? - An Interview with Alain Hunkins
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Decision Vision Episode 77:  Should I Get to Know my Employees on a Personal Level? – An Interview with Alain Hunkins

Alain Hunkins joins host Mike Blake to discuss moving leadership from a transactional to a personal level, a particularly important topic as employees expect more from their relationships at work than ever before. “Decision Vision” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Alain Hunkins, Hunkins Leadership Group

A sought-after keynote speaker, facilitator and coach, Alain Hunkins is a leadership expert who connects the science of high performance with the performing art of leadership. Leaders trust him to help unlock their potential and expand their influence, leading to superior results, increased engagement, higher levels of retention, and greater organizational and personal satisfaction. He has a gift for translating complex concepts from psychology, neuroscience and organizational behavior into simple, practical tools that can be applied on the job.

Over the course of his 20+ year career, Alain has worked with tens of thousands of leaders in over 25 countries, and served clients in all industries, including 42 Fortune 100 companies. He delivers dynamic keynotes, seminars, and workshops covering a variety of leadership topics including communication, team building, conflict management, peak performance, motivation, and change.

Alain HunkinsWith his Master’s in Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Professional Theater Training Program, and a BA from Amherst College, Alain also serves on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education, ranked #2 worldwide in 2018 by Financial Times on its list of customized Executive Education programs. Alain has lectured at UNC Kenan-Flagler’s business school and Columbia University.

Alain has authored over 400 articles, and been published by The Association for Talent Development, CEO Refresher, and the American Management Association.

Alain also authored the book Cracking the Leadership Code:  Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders.

A certified co-leader for ManKind Project International, a non-profit whose mission is to help men lead lives of service to their families, communities, and workplaces, he’s based in Northampton, MA with his wife and two children.

To connect with Alain, visit his website or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Mike Blake, Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series

Michael Blake is Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series and a Director of Brady Ware & Company. Mike specializes in the valuation of intellectual property-driven firms, such as software firms, aerospace firms and professional services firms, most frequently in the capacity as a transaction advisor, helping clients obtain great outcomes from complex transaction opportunities. He is also a specialist in the appraisal of intellectual properties as stand-alone assets, such as software, trade secrets, and patents.

Mike has been a full-time business appraiser for 13 years with public accounting firms, boutique business appraisal firms, and an owner of his own firm. Prior to that, he spent 8 years in venture capital and investment banking, including transactions in the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company is a regional full-service accounting and advisory firm which helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality. Brady Ware services clients nationally from its offices in Alpharetta, GA; Columbus and Dayton, OH; and Richmond, IN. The firm is growth minded, committed to the regions in which they operate, and most importantly, they make significant investments in their people and service offerings to meet the changing financial needs of those they are privileged to serve. The firm is dedicated to providing results that make a difference for its clients.

Decision Vision Podcast Series

“Decision Vision” is a podcast covering topics and issues facing small business owners and connecting them with solutions from leading experts. This series is presented by Brady Ware & Company. If you are a decision maker for a small business, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at decisionvision@bradyware.com and make sure to listen to every Thursday to the “Decision Vision” podcast.

Past episodes of “Decision Vision” can be found at decisionvisionpodcast.com. “Decision Vision” is produced and broadcast by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX®.

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/brady-ware/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bradywareCPAs/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradyWare

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bradywarecompany/

Show Transcript

Intro: [00:00:01] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional full service accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:21] And welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast giving you, the listener, clear vision to make great decisions. In each episode, we discuss the process of decision making on a different topic from the business owner’s or executive’s perspective. We aren’t necessarily telling you what to do, but we can put you in a position to make an informed decision on your own and understand when you might need help along the way.

Mike Blake: [00:00:40] My name is Mike Blake, and I’m your host for today’s program. I’m a director at Brady Ware & Company, a full service accounting firm based in Dayton, Ohio. With offices in Dayton, Columbus, Ohio, Richmond, Indiana, and Alpharetta, Georgia. Brady Ware is sponsoring this podcast, which is being recorded in Atlanta for social distancing protocols. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast aggregator and please consider leaving a review of the podcast as well.

Mike Blake: [00:01:07] So, today’s topic is, should I get to know my employees on a personal level? And this is a topic in business leadership that has been percolating and, I think, bubbling up to the surface really for some time. You know, it’s either been couched in certain other leadership contexts.

Mike Blake: [00:01:32] One of my favorite books on leadership by a retired naval officer named Michael Abramoff called It’s Your Ship. I heard him speak and then later read his book. And it’s a story about how he took over the the lowest performing or lowest performance rated destroyer in, I think, it was the US Pacific fleet and turned it around into the highest performing destroyer in the course of his two year tour. And terrific book. And I’m always fascinated in how you can potentially translate military leadership into the civilian sector. But one of the things that comes across very clearly in that book is that even though he had, you know, a destroyer full of officers and seamen by the hundreds, you know, he got to know most of them and care about them. And you can talk about the other things he did, which I think were very important.

Mike Blake: [00:02:32] Some of the things that I do as an aside, one of the things that I get questioned on a lot is back in the days when our firm used to actually work in an office and we would eat together, I would always make sure that I ate last or at least I ate after any of the non-partner employees did. And people would ask me, “Why do you do that?” And I said, “Well, that’s a military tradition where the enlisted people always eat first.” And the people kind of then go out from there in reverse order or ascending order of rank. And I think that’s a good idea because it’s a symbol of how you put the people on the front lines or closest to the front lines first, even though if it’s in a relatively modest way.

Mike Blake: [00:03:21] And as far as those of you who listen to this program know, I have a massive man crush on Simon Sinek. And I am going to find a way to get him on this podcast or get a restraining order. We’ll see which one of those things actually happens. And I’m a big fan of Start With Why. And then, I recently finished reading his book, The Infinite Game. And not necessarily explicit, but certainly implicit, The Infinite Game is about building relationships. As opposed to the traditional archetypal 20th Century and previous management model, which is really a transactional model. You do work. I pay you. We both go our separate ways. Simon Sinek, I think, is very much a thought leader in this notion of The Infinite Game that the notion of transaction based leadership is simply no longer viable in the 21st Century.

Mike Blake: [00:04:22] People are too smart. Maybe you can say people are too needy. A cynic might say, “Well, in a world of participation trophies, parenting is now being outsourced to leadership in the private world.” And that’s a little too cynic. But I can also see that point from a certain point of view. But, you know, what it really comes down to is moving from a transaction based leadership model into one that is relationship based. And there’s a limit to how much of a relationship you can have with somebody if you don’t know them. You can have a little bit of a relationship. But if you don’t actually know them, it’s really hard to take an interest in them in a way that is authentic and useful if you don’t actually know what kind of matters to people.

Mike Blake: [00:05:14] And frankly as an introvert, it’s something that I have to be very conscious of because I can be a very robotic manager without blinking an eye. Because, again, I’m a Generation X person, which means I’m a shut up, put your head down, do your work, and go home. That’s the culture I grew up in. That’s a culture I shake to – I struggle to shake. But I fully understand, I certainly make a conscious effort to evolve beyond that. And so, I hope for those of you who are like me that are looking for something useful in exchange for having, in my case, gray hair and two arthritic ankles, you know, something that goes along with the wisdom of age and that is evolving into a non-transactional form of leadership.

Mike Blake: [00:06:02] And so, I think this is going to be a great topic. And as an aside, by the way, I think it’s all that much more important because, you know, our people are – I mean, there are a lot of things right now, right? People ask me how I am and I tell them jokingly that, “Well, once you put a global once in a century pandemic, massive social upheaval, and murder hornets aside, I’m actually doing pretty well.” But imagine the slow moving horror movie that we find ourselves in. And our employees, our co-workers, our business partners, our bosses are all finding themselves in a life that is completely disrupted that overnight most of our support structures have been badly damaged or wiped out altogether. And there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of angst. There’s a lot of uncertainty. And frankly, there are just more mental demands on people.

Mike Blake: [00:07:10] And what that means to me is that, getting to know the people you work with on a personal level is more important than ever. And it’s not just because people are isolated now and they’re working at their coffee table. Yeah, there is that. But I think, also, people want to know that somebody out there kind of gives a damn about them. And in an environment where we can’t have that kind of contact we once had with our close friends and family, in some cases, it’s dangerous to interact with them. We need to pay attention to this all the more.

Mike Blake: [00:07:55] So, this is too big and complex a topic for me to cover myself. So, as we always do on this program, I brought in an expert who does know how to help us think about this. And joining us today is author and keynote speaker Alain Hunkins.

Mike Blake: [00:08:11] Alain is a leadership expert who connects the science of high performance with the performing art of leadership. Over the course of his 20 plus year career, Alain has worked with tens of thousands of leaders in over 25 countries and served clients in all industries, including 42 Fortune 100 companies. He delivers dynamic keynotes – I’ve seen them on YouTube -seminars and workshops covering a variety of leadership topics, including communication, team building, conflict management, peak performance, motivation and change.

Mike Blake: [00:08:40] He has a Master’s of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee’s Professional Theater Training Program. Take that, all the parents who have said that kind of degree doesn’t get you anywhere. And a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College. Alain also serves in the Faculty of Duke Corporate Education. Ranked number two worldwide in 2018 by Financial Times on this list of customized executive education programs. He has also lectured at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School and Columbia University.

Mike Blake: [00:09:11] Alain has authored over 400 articles that has been published by the Association for Talent Development, CEO Refresher, and the American Management Association. And he just released a book, Cracking the Leadership Code, which treats leadership as a skill set rather than a purely innate talent. And offers helpful guidance on how to develop or improve your own leadership skills. He’s a certified co-leader for ManKind Project International, a nonprofit whose mission is to help men live lives of service to their families, communities, and workplaces.

Mike Blake: [00:09:39] He is talking to us from the Netherlands today. But I also understand he hails from Northampton, Massachusetts, which is close to University of Massachusetts and the National Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. And I know that because I grew up about two hours away from there in Boston. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, Alain, thank you for coming to the program and welcome.

Alain Hunkins: [00:10:06] Mike, thank you so much. I’m really excited to be with you here today. Thanks.

Mike Blake: [00:10:10] So, let’s jump in here with something very basic, which is when we talk about getting to know your employees on a personal level, what does that mean to you? How would we define that?

Alain Hunkins: [00:10:26] Wow. It’s a great question. And I loved your context up front was really useful. Because I think what that means has really changed over time, getting to know. So, you talked about you’re a self-identified Gen X-er, as am I. And we came of age in the business world where it’s very common. I have even heard this, like, we check your feelings at the door. And so, the idea that work and life were two separate beings.

Alain Hunkins: [00:10:49] But, you know, the world has really changed. You talked about that and just thinking about moving from this transactional based leadership to relationship based leadership. And so, what’s happening now is the fact that we, not just as employees, but just as members of society, our expectations have totally changed about what we expect from everything.

Alain Hunkins: [00:11:13] And a big part of that has to do with information technology has allowed us to be transparent, so we know what’s going on. If we don’t like our jobs, we can look in LinkedIn and Glassdoor and there are options and we can leave. So, I say all that because what it means to get to know your people is people expect more from their relationships at work than they ever have in the past. And the cool thing is we’ve had all this great social science research that shows that when people perform at their best, they’re actually feeling at their best. So, if we want our employees to do a good job, it’s actually in our best interest to make sure the environment they’re in serves that. And a big part of how that environment becomes optimal for them to perform is for them to feel good, which means they have to feel that someone cares about them.

Alain Hunkins: [00:12:06] And actually Tony Schwartz, who wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement, and Christine Porath, who is a Georgetown professor, did this great article in The New York Times a few years ago called Why You Hate Work. And it had tons of research. And they found that actually feeling cared for is the number one thing that improves engagement and decreases turnover. So, it’s so funny because it sounds so soft and fluffy, right? “Oh, I got to care about my people. Get to know them.” There’s actually some great metrics that show there’s a lot of hard science and performance result. So, for the bottom liners, there is a lot of hard evidence for this very soft and fluffy skill. So, that’s why it’s so important to get to know your people.

Mike Blake: [00:12:56] So, a term that often enters a discussion like this and others, but we’re talking about this, is the notion of authenticity. And I’m hoping you can talk about what authenticity means in your mind and how does it enter this discussion of getting to know your employees?

Alain Hunkins: [00:13:18] Yeah. It’s a great question. You know, there’s this big hoopla around authentic. It’s like people are like, “Well, what if you’re authentically a jerk? Do I show up as an authentic jerk?” Like, “Ah. Maybe.” So, that’s not really what authenticity is about. I mean in the work context, when we think about being authentic, it’s that sense that people don’t have to wear a mask. I mean, obviously, we’re in COVID times, people are wearing physical masks. I’m talking about the psychological mask. The armor that people put on.

Alain Hunkins: [00:13:45] You know, Deloitte did this great study a few years ago and they found that 61 percent of the US employee workforce feels the need to cover their identities in some ways. They have to wear a mask. And the thing is, we all know what it’s like. We’ve all been in situations where we have to kind of put up our guard and wear a mask. And when we do that, we are disconnected both from the people around us, but in some ways from ourselves, because it takes a lot of extra energy to put on that shield.

Alain Hunkins: [00:14:14] So, authenticity is about having a relationship where people can be who they are and express what’s going on. Like, I think the idea that right now, for example, we’re going through this coronavirus pandemic. It makes sense for a leader to say, “You know, it’s okay not to be okay.” This is really tough. This is tough. These are hard times. And so, we have to normalize people’s experience because people are always looking to leaders to set the tone. And if we just pretend like it’s business as usual, deep down people are going to feel like, “Well, there’s nothing wrong. And we’re not talking about this.” And it becomes the elephant in the room.

Alain Hunkins: [00:14:55] So, authenticity is a way to address things in a way where people can drop their guard, let down their defenses, and just relax. And when they do that, the neuroscience would be it actually calms your central nervous system. And when you’re calmer, it frees up these neural resources, your brain, so you can actually focus on the job at hand instead of kind of going, “Am I okay? Is this okay? What does my boss think about me?” And all those weird thoughts that we all have all the time. So, authenticity is key to all that.

Mike Blake: [00:15:27] And, you know, that brings up another question. So, I’m going to go ahead and go off script, which by question three that means we’re on schedule. But you know, in these trying times, I think most companies are at least asking the question, how can we help our employees cope? And some things are realistically within the purview of employers to help with. And some things, frankly, just aren’t. And we cannot fix everything. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the standing to do that. But you really can’t even begin to help employees through this. And I’m going to make this deliberately vague, whatever this is, because it’s different for everybody. You can’t begin to fix it if you don’t know them, can you?

Alain Hunkins: [00:16:13] No, you can’t. You can’t. And it’s so interesting, because as you describe this idea of fixing it, you’ve touched on such a big leadership trap, which I call – it’s actually the fixer. So, many people in organizations who are in leadership roles think, “Oh, I’m in charge. I have to fix things. I have to solve problems and make things better.” People don’t actually want to work for fixers. They want to work for leaders. And the cool thing is you don’t need to be a mind reader to figure out what’s going on. The fact is, like, for example, coronavirus pandemic. I guess we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat. The fact is, everyone is experiencing this. And I’ll call it a trauma because, by the way, the definition of trauma in the dictionary is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. So, I think this qualifies, global pandemic, would you say? It’s a trauma.

Mike Blake: [00:16:58] I think so.

Alain Hunkins: [00:16:59] Yeah. I think it qualifies. Sure. So, that being said, how every single person that you work with is going to respond differently. Some people are living home and they’re alone. Other people have small kids. They have to suddenly home school and they’re now teaching on top of work. I mean, people who may be immunocompromised. They may have elderly parents. Like, we don’t know what they’re dealing with. So, the key to knowing your people isn’t to try to fix it and guess. It’s to ask them.

Alain Hunkins: [00:17:26] So, you know, I’ve been coaching a lot of leaders on this over the last few months. Like a simple question just to stop and go, “Hey. How are you? How are you feeling?” And not just, “I’m fine, how are you? Let’s get to business.” Like, “No. Really, how are you doing?” Which means as a leader, you need to park your own agenda. Put it to the side and hold space for somebody else. Now, some people are really uncomfortable because if they ask the question, how are you feeling? Guess what? If you listen, they might tell you. And some people think, “I can’t handle that.”

Alain Hunkins: [00:17:57] You know, the thing that’s really good, you don’t need to be some kind of a licensed psychologist to deal with this. All you have to be is an emphatic human. The fact is, if there are people in your life, like your family and your friends that you love and care about, you do this much more easily. Somehow, though, a lot of us have this barrier when it comes to work, when it comes to employees and asking them how they feel, that’s inappropriate. And then, they’re like, “Oh, let’s get to business.” So, yeah, it’s very much – it’s key for you to, first of all, get out of that fixer mindset.

Alain Hunkins: [00:18:26] And then second, start to listen with some purpose and have some empathy for other people’s situations. And if it turns out that what they’re dealing with is not something you can fix, just the fact that you listen and go, “I hear you. I don’t know what I can do, but I’d like to help you figure out what can get done.” That goes a long way. People get the fact that, “You know what? Ninety-five percent of our customers are gone and our business is about to close.” People get it. You know, they’re not stupid. They’re adults. And so, we have to stop treating them like their children. And a big part of that is getting to know them in their full life outside of just the functional job box that they sit in on your two dimensional industrial aged org chart.

Mike Blake: [00:19:12] And that speaks to, I think, getting out, again, of a transactional mindset. You know, getting away from – you’re not asking somebody how they are or what’s going on because that’s the necessary social protocol than to extract work. It’s a legitimate question. And I love the term empathy. I love the term empathy there.

Mike Blake: [00:19:36] And you bring up a point which I think about a lot and I want to share here, too. Is that it is scary to ask people how they’re doing because you don’t know what you’re going to get back. Right? And caring requires a certain level of courage, doesn’t it? Because once you care, you then adopt some form of ownership or responsibility. Maybe not to fix what’s going on, because that may be beyond your power. But once you do care, you do then have an obligation to share a little bit of yourself, whether it’s your time, your attention, your empathy, in order to help that person deal with whatever it is that’s going on.

Alain Hunkins: [00:20:26] Absolutely you do. Yeah. You can’t but help become invested in some way. You know, as you say that it’s funny. It reminds me, you know, we talk a big game about how important it is for employees to be engaged. You know, we’re always measuring how is our employee engagement? Well, do we ever stop and think about how is the engagement of our leaders? The fact is, as leaders, if we’re not engaged with employees, why would they be engaged with us and or at work? It doesn’t make any sense.

Alain Hunkins: [00:20:52] So, yeah, definitely you need to extend yourself to what’s going on. And yeah, you may not be comfortable with it. And this may derail your agenda. But that’s part of leadership. This is part of stepping into a role where, you know, you want to get somewhere, you have an outcome, but the map is not the territory. And somebody brings something up and suddenly this is the most important thing in this moment. Now, hopefully we’ll get back to something else, but this may take us in a different direction. And that’s being – I’ll call it mature. A mature leader to be able to do that.

Alain Hunkins: [00:21:29] And it’s funny, before you said, Mike, about the sense that, you know, some people are scared of bringing it up or they feel like there’s this protocol. The fact is, we can all smell it really quickly when someone is faking this. When someone thinks, “Oh, I have to ask you how you’re feeling, because my leadership coach told me I’m supposed to ask you that, but I really don’t care. And now that I’ve asked you that, I’m going to move on.” We all know when people are faking it. So, this does have to come from that – we’ll use that word again – authenticity that you actually genuinely care. And that is a different mindset for a lot of people. In fact, I would say that shift, which you described earlier, you know, that shift from transactional to relational may be the biggest divide that leaders have to cross to be able to do this whole caring for your people well.

Mike Blake: [00:22:14] So, let’s say that a listener now is convinced, I need to do a better job or I want to do a better job of getting to know my employees at all on a personal level or better. Is that a formal process, is it an informal process, or is it both? And I guess what I’m really getting at is, what are a couple of steps to get started once I’ve made that decision? Or if I’m going to make that decision, what are the next steps going to be?

Alain Hunkins: [00:22:42] Great question. So, I think there are some formal and there are some informal. I say on the formal side, first of all, is be intentional and make some time. Because this won’t necessarily happen in the elevator, on the water cooler, or in this case, you know, while people are just coming in waiting for the Zoom meeting to start. So, get intentional about carving out some time. The other thing I’d say on a formal point of view is, think about your structure if this helps you. Now, some people are really good at drawing people out, we call it naturally or they’ve already had some practice at it. If you’re not one of those people, you want to think about what would be some really great open-ended questions to get people talking. Because ideally they are doing 80, 85 percent of the talking and you are just asking some really good questions. And then, maybe prompting them with a tell me more. So, that’s the formal side.

Alain Hunkins: [00:23:33] On the informal side, I think it’s showing up, being present, being really open, being curious as to what they have to say, and listening with purpose. So, if I want to get to know someone, so asking a really provocative question like, “What is your biggest aspiration professionally?” That suddenly is different from, you know, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Or, “What is really exciting to you now?” Or, “What was your biggest hobby growing up?” Or, “What was a big challenge growing up?” You know, suddenly just getting people – it sort of doesn’t matter which one you choose. Let’s face it, we all had these rich lives with incredible history. And if someone just asked us to share, tell me – or you could even say, “So, what’s your story? Tell me your story. I’d like to know more about you.”

Alain Hunkins: [00:24:23] If it’s genuine, people know it and they’ll start to open up. And if you give them the cues that you’re interested and want to hear more, they will share more. You know, I think it was Dale Carnegie in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People who said, if you want to be interesting, be interested. And so, being interested in people – you know, we love to joke in the field that people’s favorite subject to talk about is themselves. So, you know, it’s true for customers. Why wouldn’t it be true for the people that you lead? So, taking some time upfront, thinking about intentionally how would you structure this conversation, it’s amazing. You can get more information in a half-an-hour call like this than you can otherwise.

Alain Hunkins: [00:25:07] In fact, in one of the leadership trainings I run, I actually have strangers who are confederates. We bring them in, but they’re strangers to the participants – the leader participants. And they have to basically spend a-half-an-hour engaging with a stranger. And then, we debrief the experience at the end. And one of the leaders who went through this said to me, “Oh, my gosh. I just spent 30 minutes with someone. I’m convinced I know more about this person than people who have been on my team working for me for the last five years.”

Alain Hunkins: [00:25:35] So, it’s amazing what the power of intention and the power of saying “I want to engage and get to know you” can do. You know, we like to say that,”Oh, it takes years and years to build trust.” You can accelerate that process with some good intention and some great questioning and listening skills.

Mike Blake: [00:25:55] So, how much of this also is making yourself knowable, right? And I think in that same book, Dale Carnegie talks about making it easy for people to get to know you as well. For example, in my office, I keep a music synthesizer. I almost never play it, but I keep it because it lets people know that I have a musical interest. So, if they ever wanted to ask about that, it sort of gives them an entree. And I’m big into the retro video games and I’m 50, so I’m not trying to impress anybody anymore. And I’m open about it. But I guess my point is that, how important is it also to allow yourself to be known at the same time?

Alain Hunkins: [00:26:42] It’s really important. In fact, there’s this really cool studies that have come out about this. There’s a guy named David Meerman Scott, and he’s got a book that came out about a year ago called Fanocracy. And what he discovered in his research – so, David Meerman Scott happens to be a Grateful Dead fan and he shares that whenever he does talks and workshops, he shares pictures, he talks about it. And what’s amazing is the impact is it doesn’t matter. It isn’t about what it is. It’s that he’s got an interest in something that that creates connection. So for you, it’s your synthesizer and your music in your office. It’s just like showing people that you’re not just a two dimensional worker bee. You know, people want to know that you have a life, you have interests outside. And when we do that, it actually humanizes us, it softens the edges and it creates and accelerates this power of connection. So, it’s called Fanocracy, this idea of how do you turn customers into raving fans. I think we could also say how do you turn employees into raving fans? It’s like let them know who you are.

Alain Hunkins: [00:27:45] You know, we talked earlier about the whole Gen X thing. So, 61 percent of our workforce today is Gen Y and Gen Z. And, you know, they’ve grown up in this digital world where there’s so much more transparency. I have a sister who’s 14 years younger than me and the amount of personal stuff that she posts on Facebook versus me, it’s just we’re different generations in some ways. And it’s just amazing. Because, again, she’s kind of grown up and this is what her peer group does. And they’re just so comfortable with having their world be transparent and knowing that everything is seen. I mean, this is the issue now with social media and the digital footprint is that if you say something somewhere, there’s probably a track on it. So, you’ve got to be pretty comfortable with whatever you put out there someone’s going to see somewhere.

Mike Blake: [00:28:31] So, some of our listeners may be thinking, you know, I’m already making an effort. We have our annual holiday party. We have a couple of firm events. Maybe we have an outing to a baseball game back when that wasn’t a risk your life kind of thing. But, you know, we have our spring outing or whatever. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that already mean I’m getting to know my employees?

Alain Hunkins: [00:28:58] Well, it’s funny, right? Yeah. We do it once a year. I mean, to me, the analogy there is a little bit – so, I’ve been married to my wife. We’re coming up on 20 years of marriage. We’ve been together 22 years. And I think the analogy I come up with it is like, so I said to her on our wedding day that I love you. Now, can I use the excuse like, “Well, I said it on our wedding day. Isn’t that good enough?” So, this idea that telling people you care about them at the annual picnic, I mean, if people care about you, wouldn’t you want them to tell you more often?

Alain Hunkins: [00:29:26] So, Gallup did this wonderful study, which they published in this book called First Break All the Rules, where they actually interviewed over a million people around the world. And they spent 20 years doing all the research to put this together. And what they found is that there’s one thing above everything else that makes for a successful employee. And they measured success by profitability, productivity, lower turnover, higher retention, stuff like that. It was what was that relationship with their immediate supervisor?

Alain Hunkins: [00:29:55] So, I would say a couple of things on this. Number one is, let’s say your – let’s just call you the CEO for now and you have 400 employees in your organization. Now, I wouldn’t expect you to get to know every single person on a deep, deep personal because it’s 400. But, hopefully, there are some layers of leadership. And so, you may have, let’s say, ten direct reports. You should really be modeling getting to know them well and being explicit about the importance of them getting to know their people well and so on and so forth. So, that’s one piece.

Alain Hunkins: [00:30:24] The other thing that the Gallup study talked about that was really useful, they turned it into these 12 questions, the Gallup 12. And one of these questions is, has someone, basically, praised me in the last seven days? Now, I’ve shared that research with people in my work. And people say, “Seven days? I’d settle for seven months.” Because some of us think, “Oh, I do it once a year. We do it on our performance review. After all, they have a job. They have a paycheck. Isn’t that motivation enough?” No, it’s not. I mean, all the studies would say, actually, money, once we get to a certain threshold, isn’t going to motivate a whole lot of performance, especially in this knowledge work economy that we live in.

Alain Hunkins: [00:31:01] You know, it might have been so if you said, “Okay. I got to produce ten widgets today. And tomorrow, if you do 12, we’ll pay you more.” But in this creative problem solving knowledge world that we live in, money is not going to be that motivator. So, yeah, getting to know people is, in fact, quite important.

Mike Blake: [00:31:20] So, now we have this relatively new dynamic. It’s not that new anymore, I guess. But for Gen X-ers like me, where the internet consisted of a 300 board modem connected to an Atari 400, it is new. But social media now comes into this, right? And I’d love to get your thoughts. I generally don’t connect with my coworkers on, say, Facebook. And really hesitate even to do it on LinkedIn. Mainly because, particularly, if they’re subordinate with me, I don’t want to feel like they – I don’t want to put them in a position of wondering if they feel like they have to connect with me because I’m higher ranked within the organization. Is that a legitimate concern or am I being overly cautious or am I not being cautious enough?

Alain Hunkins: [00:32:12] Well, Mike, what I love about your approach there is you’re not – now, I don’t know how you are. If they send you an invite, if you accept or not. So, here’s the thing, I think the point of view of, you know, there is all sorts of, we’ll call it baggage, that the leader wears along with their position, which is we have an outsized influence. So, like you’ve said, if you reach out and send a Facebook invitation to one of your direct reports like, “If I don’t accept this, what’s that going to say?” And then, suddenly they have this whole story. So, I think the strategy of if you’re in that leader role, I would wait. I would not reach out. And I would let people make the first move and be quite okay with them not. Or the other option is you are also welcome to be very explicit.

Alain Hunkins: [00:32:59] I’m a huge believer that one of the things great leaders do is they make their implicit assumptions explicit. So, if you feel comfortable, say, you know, as you are onboarding people onto your team, “Hey, I just want to let you know up front here’s my social media policy. I don’t connect. It doesn’t mean this. It doesn’t mean that. This is what it means.” And letting people know because then they’re not getting into this whole weird guessing game. You know, it’s amazing how much drama and politics goes on when people don’t have accurate information and they have to fill in the vacuum. And where we tend to fill in vacuums as humans is with negativity. So, the more you can be clear and overt and also realize you don’t want to put undue pressure on people, yeah, I wouldn’t go and start sending out friend invites to everybody because, otherwise, it’s going to put them in a very uncomfortable situation.

Mike Blake: [00:33:48] So, another question I think some of our listeners will likely have and a concern is, does getting to know your employees lead to a scenario in which you’re playing favorites? And can that – is there a risk of that interjecting kind of unwelcome politics into the workplace? And if that is a risk, what would your recommendations be on managing it?

Alain Hunkins: [00:34:15] That is a great question. So, yeah, it certainly presents a risk, this whole idea of playing favorites. So, you know, there’s a couple of things that go on the psychological level when you get to know people. So, psychologists call one of these things the similarity attraction effect, which is a fancy way for saying, “Oh, you went to the same college I did. Did you? Oh.” Like, suddenly you’re bonded. Or you have the same sports team you love. We start bonding over our shared commonalities.

Alain Hunkins: [00:34:43] So, one thing leaders should be aware of is this creates a huge unconscious bias. So, if you don’t check that and go, “Wow. I am totally wanting to spend time and promote this person because they’re so much like me. They look like me. They talk like me.” So, this is a huge thing, especially in this age where we’re trying to understand that if you want to get the best people in the best places, you want to create a diverse and inclusive workforce. And I’m not meaning just racially and socially economic. In every way, you want to create diversity and inclusion because that’s how you’re going to get the best ideas to innovate and come up with great things to move your business forward.

Alain Hunkins: [00:35:21] So, what this means is we want to be able to check our unconscious bias as best as we can, which is hard. It’s really hard to do that well. And realize that getting to know some people, am I starting to play favorites? And I think one thing that’s really valuable around this is for us, as leaders, to clarify our own values and check in with this. Because if we don’t recognize that we’re doing it, we will be doing it unconsciously and it can definitely lead to problems.

Alain Hunkins: [00:35:58] Now, one of the issues also connected to this is the idea that treating people differently actually makes sense. I’m not saying treat everyone the same, but different people are motivated by different things. And so, a big piece of effective leadership around getting to know people is different people. For example, if you want to recognize them, one person on your team, giving them a cash gift or some kind of a bonus means a lot. Somebody else, it might be doing a public thank you in front of the team or sending a note home to their family. So, you don’t want to treat everyone the same. However, the intention behind it is you want to care for people with an equal level of respect. I realize that is a bit of a subtle distinction, but this is why leadership is a lot easier to talk about than it is to do.

Mike Blake: [00:36:51] And the bias thing, that brings up kind of what I think is an interesting discussion topic, which is, I think in some cases we see employees run amok. Especially with that built-in connection, in particular, when we encounter or we observe what is now known, I guess, as the bro culture. Which is being revealed to be pretty toxic in areas of finance and areas of high growth emerging technology companies. And one of the things that I guess I struggle with, but I try to be very conscious of is that, right now the way our society is generally structured, you know, women and men have a different availability for our friendship or different availability for those kinds of of communications.

Mike Blake: [00:37:47] And to be very specific, right now in America, it is more likely still that women are bearing the bulk of the responsibility for domestic management, taking care of children, et cetera. Men, conversely, don’t necessarily have that responsibility. So, if you want to go out for drinks afterwards, men are more likely to be available than women. Women often need to or have needs that ought to be accommodated. They need to leave the office early, right? And there have been studies that have shown that that does, in fact, hurt women’s careers. And that’s something that we have to be conscious of.

Mike Blake: [00:38:31] But I think what you’re talking about that having the commonality and that bias, if you’re really not careful, it can run amok into creating a massive wedge within the organization, often in an unintended way along gender and, potentially, even racial boundaries.

Alain Hunkins: [00:38:53] Oh, completely, Mike. I mean, as you’re talking about that, that’s exactly where my mind was going to, is realizing, you know, as there has been such an awakening in the US over the last eight or so weeks since before we recorded here, thinking about all of the social unrest in the wake of the George Floyd murder. And recognizing that people are being more woken up to the fact that these biases exist. And the challenge with any kind of power dynamic bias is, in general, power tends to be blind to itself unless it gets some kind of a wake up call that says, “Hey, you should notice this because your privilege is creating these inequities.”

Alain Hunkins: [00:39:36] And for example, like you said, if I don’t stop and think, “Oh, when I invite the team out to drink, some people don’t come.” If I don’t stop to think about what that implication is and I go, “Oh. So, I’m building relationships with those people.” I need to really check – I’m doing all of that from a position of power and a position of privilege. So, it is important for me to check my position of privilege and power at the door and realize what’s the implications. Because, as you said, that can get very messy very quickly.

Mike Blake: [00:40:08] So, another concern is how do you prevent developing relationship with your employees from interfering with tough but necessary to say — but the downside of getting to know your employees as the time may come when you effectively have to fire a friend? And I fired people before. For the most part, I haven’t enjoyed it. There’s one person I couldn’t wait to see leave. I’m just going to be honest about it. That person made my life bad from start to finish. I could not wait for him to leave. So, I didn’t lose any sleep. For most part when I had to let people go, it’s a terrible day. Not as terrible as the person who’ve been let go, but it still ain’t fun.

Mike Blake: [00:40:55] And now, I’m imagining somebody who’s been through the worse and they’ve had to fire, maybe, lots of people over the years. And saying, “You know what? I don’t want to put myself in a position of potentially having to fire somebody that I care about and sees me as their friend.” Because now there’s not just a level of commercial betrayal. There’s a level, potentially, of personal betrayal. How do you work through that? How do you work through that head maze?

Alain Hunkins: [00:41:25] Yeah. There’s a lot. So, we have to unpack this a bit because there’s a lot there. So, let’s just start with, first of all, getting to know people and having to fire them in terms of – let’s just back it up for a second. One of the things I see a lot of leaders struggle with employees is, we don’t make – we talked about this earlier, about this whole mind reading thing -is we need to really clarify expectations and accountabilities upfront. Accountability is this big buzzword these days. We have to hold our people accountable.

Alain Hunkins: [00:41:57] I don’t actually think that leaders need to hold anyone accountable. I think what we need to do is clarify expectations, co-create objectives up front, set those with people, and check in with them along the way, ideally to support them. And if things start to go off track, if they’re not achieving what we have co-created and agreed upon, then I’m not really holding you accountable. I’m just reminding you of the commitments you’re making and that we’ve made. And that should be built on a foundation of honesty, openness, and trust.

Alain Hunkins: [00:42:32] And so, that’s why we can get to know each other. And if there are issues, let’s say you’re under performing in some way. So, my first take is I’m not going to wait until the end of whatever project deliverable or year performance review to come over and say, “Hey, Mike. You know, you screwed this up. And now, you better watch out because you may not have a job here.” Ideally, I would have caught that way sooner, come in and noticed where the trend is, and saying, “Hey, I just want to check in. What’s going on? Is there something that I can support you with?” Suddenly we have a different conversation. So, a big piece around accountability is co-creating those expectations.

Alain Hunkins: [00:43:07] Now, that being said, it doesn’t make it easier when you let people go when you care about them. So, I mean, to me, it’s also recognizing, you know, we tend to – and I’ll go back to what you talked about Simon Sinek and The Infinite Game. If we see a person’s career as this finite, “Okay. You’re hired. You’re fired.” And so, hired means success and fired means failure. I mean, how can we extend those relationships beyond that? So, for example, I have seen and known people who have actually walked out of a meeting getting terminated and actually feel closer to their leader than they did when they walked in, because their leader cared for them. They talked about how we can support you in this transition. They talked about how do we stay in touch and be an alumnus of this network in our organization.

Alain Hunkins: [00:43:57] So, a lot of this is the mindset. If we walk into this of, “You know, I’m firing them. I am slitting their throats.” It’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re actually terminating an employment contract. Like, let’s get clear on that.” And then, how can I – so, this has to do with being honest, straightforward, clear, and you can be empathetic. And we can all learn. And this, again, takes maturity to do all this. So, there’s a lot here. And again, easier said than done. But that’s the ideal that we’re moving towards is, how do we treat people that way? I mean, you could look at that in an analogy. You can look at that at a family system. It’s like, “Well, you know, I could care about my kids and love them, but, you know, they’re going to just move out of the house when they’re 18.”

Alain Hunkins: [00:44:40] You know, at a certain point you’ve got to invest because the investment actually pays dividends longer term. And it will pay dividends in ways you don’t even know. So, as opposed to just thinking, “Okay. Well, this is just an employee, so I’m not going to get to know them too much.” Because what you’re really doing is you’re treating them as a thing. And we’re going back to transactional world again.

Mike Blake: [00:45:04] And really what you’re describing, I think – and I’m using extreme event. It doesn’t have to be termination, but it just makes the conversation easier – is really, probably, what, I think, we consider best practices when you have to let anybody go. You would like it, again, not to be sort of the Dr. Evil kind of scenario. You push a button, the employee drops through a flaming pit. But there is actually some empathy that this is a transitional conversation. And, you know, how can I help make this easier for you, even though this is necessary?

Mike Blake: [00:45:40] You know, in a way, getting to know the employees, I think, if you follow that thesis to the conclusion here, it’s really nudging you in a way that you probably want to go and you probably want to have yourself viewed as a leader and as a company to other prospective employees down the road, right?

Alain Hunkins: [00:46:02] Totally. Totally. I mean, if you think about it, the natural extension of getting to know your people is, “Now that I know them, if it comes time for us to part ways, I’ll be in a much better position to part ways in a more effective, we’ll call win-win situation than we would otherwise.” Because otherwise, it’s much more transactional and much more Dr. Evil less. So, that’s what we can do. And so, by being a kind of leader that cares about people, you’re in a much better situation and you know so much more, so you can make better decisions as you move forward.

Mike Blake: [00:46:38] But I got to be careful using Dr. Evil because there are going to be millennials and Gen Y who have no idea who Dr. Evil is. So, anyway, look it up on YouTube, or Instagram, or TikTok, or whatever it is you’re doing. So, a question I’ve got to get to – and we’re wrapping up. I want to be respectful of your time, especially where you are, it’s approaching dinnertime. But the elephant in the room here – and we’re saving the best for last – is what is the danger of a romantic relationship? Or I’m not sure if it’s worse, but at least equally bad, a romantic feeling that is not reciprocated arising from getting to know your employees better.

Mike Blake: [00:47:29] It’s a natural danger that, you know, intimacy can lead then to desires for other things. I think we both agree can be, in my view, personally, I think are very likely to be enormously destructive. How do you put up a firewall to minimize the likelihood of something like that occurring?

Alain Hunkins: [00:47:55] Oh, my gosh. What a good juicy question we have here. Yes. So this is a big one because, let’s face it, we’re human. And, you know, there’s lots going on. So, one of the things is, first of all, if you’re in a position of leadership in an organization – this probably varies from state to state and even organization – first of all, check your policies first. Like, see what’s legitimate and legal in terms of your organizational policies and all that first. And get really clear on that before any of this stuff happens. Just find it out first, do me a favor, please.

Alain Hunkins: [00:48:27] And then, in terms of that, yeah, for certain, if you are in the leadership role, again, there is a power dynamic. Even though we don’t talk about it, it’s there. And I think that you have to proceed with huge caution around moving forward anyway because of that power dynamic going on. So, again, kind of like you talked about before – let’s assume that the policy is it’s okay. I would say, like we talk with social media, if I’m in a position of power, I do not think it is appropriate for me to initiate any of this. And I would backtrack as much as possible. Like, I wouldn’t send a friend invite, the same thing, because that’s going on.

Alain Hunkins: [00:49:13] Now, you also talked about the sense of what if it’s not reciprocated? I mean, this is where we get into dicier waters, right? So, you want to maintain professional boundaries. That being said, many people in the world have met who ends up becoming their partner/spouse in a work context. It’s going to happen. But I think underneath the principle we’re talking about is being intentional, being conscious, checking your biases, and being respectful of the other person at all times. I think that’s a good rule of thumb to proceed, but also check your policies.

Mike Blake: [00:49:52] You know, and I think that brings to mind a theme that then, I think, recurs is, make sure you’re authentic and you have the right motivation for initiating the get to know you better kind of relationship, the friendship. Because part of the issue with the power dynamic of romance is that, I think, in many cases that does revert back to a transactional space. And I think one of the ways that, at least, a nominally well-intentioned effort to get to know your employees better can be perverted is to then adopt a view that while this is going to become transactional, there’s something that I can extract out of this. And boy, that is sticking your fork in a plugged in toaster standing in a bathtub full of water, isn’t it?

Alain Hunkins: [00:50:53] Totally. It totally is. And, you know, you talked about the sense of, you know, where caring for your people might start to cross the line. We’ve got to be clear, there’s caring for people and that doesn’t necessarily mean intimate caring. There’s a big difference. Just in the same way that I can tell someone that I love them. I have coworkers and I say I love you all. You know, this is totally platonic love. It’s not like I love you and now let’s go and get married.

Alain Hunkins: [00:51:20] Love, there’s a difference. And, you know, part of this is having the wisdom to be able to say that and understand it and to live that. And this goes back to, like you said, the authenticity and the clarity of your purpose and what your intentions are behind it. And people can tell – you know, people smell out intentions pretty well. So, it’s important for us to smell out our own intentions first.

Mike Blake: [00:51:41] And if you can’t handle that, then maybe it makes sense that maybe you dial it back, right? You may not be emotionally wired to engage in a productive relationship. And that may require some kind of psychotherapy or reflection or spirituality to help you kind of work through. But, you know, if in your own self-assessment, you say, “You know what? I just can’t.” Maybe you even have a history. Once I start that relationship, I’m kind of all or nothing. But that may be a situation where if it’s really all or nothing, then maybe nothing is actually better.

Alain Hunkins: [00:52:19] Yeah, for sure. You bring up such a good point here around this whole sense. Because, you know, different people learn about how you develop romantic relationships from a lot of different role models. And some of those role models are healthy and a lot are not healthy. So, we need to kind of check out, like, where am I coming from? And of course, the problem with this is when you’re in a leadership role in an organization, you now have a position of privilege. And people are going to project onto you. It’s like, “Oh, you’re an executive vice president. You’ve got your stuff together and all these other things.” Well, maybe that person has actually gotten some emotional arrested development around relationship building skills when it comes to romance. And suddenly that lack of maturity is now acting out all over the place.

Alain Hunkins: [00:53:01] So, this is why it’s so important, as you said, for us to go back and understand where we’re coming from. So, that’s why we talked about leadership development and personal development. The fact is the two are totally inextricably linked. You can’t really do one without the other because the person is the leader and the leader is the person.

Mike Blake: [00:53:21] So, Alain, this has been a terrific conversation, frankly, even better than than I had hoped. I think we’re already setting a record for the longest podcast we’ve ever done. So, thank you for putting up with that. And I have nine more questions I could ask. But how could people contact you if they want to learn more about this topic, maybe open a dialogue with you, get a quick piece of advice, something like that?

Alain Hunkins: [00:53:46] Yeah, sure thing. So, easiest place to find me is my website, which is www.alainhunkins. I’m going to spell that because it’s a French name. Alain, A-L-A-I-N-H-U-N-K-I-N-S.com. A lot of my thinking is actually been captured in my book, Cracking the Leadership Code. There’s a link to it on my website. You can also go to crackingtheleadershipcode.com and preview the book, download a chapter. And you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on that platform. But you won’t find me on Instagram because I’m an old Gen X-er who doesn’t do that as my 13 year old daughter reminds me of all the time.

Mike Blake: [00:54:24] Well, that’s going to wrap it up for today’s program. And I’ll haul out my French degrees and pronounce it properly. So, I like to thank Alain Hunkins so much for joining us and sharing his expertise with us today.

Mike Blake: [00:54:35] We’ll be exploring a new topic each week, so please tune in so that when you’re faced with your next executive decision, you have clear vision when making it. If you enjoy these podcasts, please consider leaving a review with your favorite podcast aggregator. It helps people find us that we can help them. Once again, this is Mike Blake. Our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. And this has been the Decision Vision podcast.

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