As a business owner, it’s difficult to do the right work AND guide your company toward its next big initiative.
With Red Direction Business Base Camp, learn how to implement and handle processes to meet your business’s specific needs and better understand your market.
Starting the conversation:
Are you tired of playing catch-up in a rapidly changing market? Discover how empowering your team to think proactively and solve problems creatively can unlock hidden growth potential and turn uncertainty into your competitive advantage. This BOLD Business Podcast Panel discusses how to unlock team potential by building a creative and proactive business environment.
Meet the Panelists:
- Brad Englert, Advisor, Technologist, lasting professional relationships
- Grace Gavin, Co-Founder of Know Honesty
- Dr. Yaniv Zaid, CEO, Speaker, Doctor, Consultant Dr. Persuasion
Three things we dig deeply into:
- Perfection is the Enemy of Progress:
Quit waiting for people to speak up with bold, creative ideas. The hard truth: your company culture might be scaring creativity into silence. Learn how to flip the script and empower every voice, not just the loudest. - From Command-and-Control to Trust-and-Inspire:
Your leadership style can determine whether your business stays relevant or gets left behind. Hear real stories from leaders who broke out of the old-school, top-down mold — and what happened to the ones who couldn’t. - Failure is the New Secret Weapon:
What if you ran a “Failure Lab” at your company? Discover why sharing stories of screw-ups — not just wins — could be the untapped source of innovation and resilience your business needs right now.
Jess Dewell is your host facilitating this discussion about how staying curious, receptive, and open to new ideas — regardless of experience level — keeps the organization competitive. Because it is BOLD to empower teams to be forward-thinking and grow through creative problem-solving.
What You Will Hear:
06:00 How can we empower our teams to be forward-thinking and proactively identify potential areas for growth, maybe even through creative problem-solving?
- Leaders must set the expectation for empowerment, or it will not happen organically within the organization.
- Cultures that reward only heroics and quick fixes must be shifted toward more proactive and customer-focused problem-solving.
- Changing a culture to reward proactive customer service, rather than heroics, often leads to different people rising and falling within the organization.
13:20 Culture change takes time and intentional communication from leadership.
- The first critical step in culture change is to specifically define and articulate the organization’s values.
- Consistency in communication is key, such as regularly sharing messages about values, successes, and failures through internal blogs or communications.
- Leaders should create regular opportunities for customers and stakeholders to provide input and articulate their needs.
18:35 Embracing failure as a key part of growth and innovation.
- Teams and leaders should view failures as learning opportunities and actively seek lessons from them for future improvement.
- Examining stories of failure, even when uncomfortable, can spark curiosity and inspire growth by showing the process of moving from failure to success.
- If people or teams get stuck in failure or feel unable to admit mistakes, organizations become less resilient and less capable of moving forward.
23:00 We’re part of a broader paradigm shift in leadership — moving from command-and-control to trust-and-inspire.
- Leadership styles are evolving from traditional command-and-control approaches to ones focused on trust and inspiration.
- Transitioning to a trust-based, inspiring leadership model is a gradual process that rarely happens overnight.
- Some individuals may not adapt to these changes, either due to discomfort or unwillingness, which creates growing pains within organizations.
30:30 Love and genuine care for people are fundamental to leadership.
- To lead effectively, managers must genuinely care about and pay attention to the people they lead or serve.
- A successful manager acts as a mentor — someone employees can relate to and look up to, not just instruct or manage.
- Treating employees as individuals, not numbers, is crucial to motivating and inspiring teams.
35:40 Optimism, positivity, and trust are strengths to navigate long-term, uncertain change.
- Focusing on long-term perspective and maintaining optimism helps leaders and teams cope with difficult periods.
- Past challenges that once seemed insurmountable often become sources of humor or learning in hindsight, underscoring resilience.
- Leaders must actively encourage team members to trust themselves and exercise independent decision-making.
40:00 Supporting autonomy and stepping back allows teams and individuals to grow and surprise leaders.
- There is an ongoing balance for leaders between directing their teams and empowering them to act independently.
- When given autonomy, most employees will rise to the occasion and demonstrate capabilities beyond expectations.
- Leadership rooted in ego or titles blocks real team growth, while those who step back create room for genuine leadership at all levels.
47:35 Leaders must actively listen and create safe environments for creativity and honest feedback.
- Leaders who listen, rather than dominate conversations, are better able to foster creativity and innovation within their teams.
- It is important for leaders to intentionally resist the urge to always talk, instead cultivating space for new ideas from others.
- Hiring talented people requires leaders to let those talents flourish, rather than micromanaging or stifling them.
48:40 It is BOLD to cultivate forward-thinking, creative problem-solving for business growth. The biggest takeaways from each panelist:
- Grace Gavin: “To really answer this question of how do — how do I help my team step up, how do I help them develop these skills or whatever it is the question of, well, what work have you done as the leader? Have you made it possible? Have you created the ability for them to step into it?”
- Brad Englert: “Creating a safe ecosystem in your organization where it is OK to raise issues. And you know, that’s your job as the leader to make it safe.”
- Dr. Yaniv Zaid: “Learn how to listen to people in order to be a great leader, a great manager. And, to share ideas in addition to asking questions. Be open to failure by implementing a Failure Lab.”
Resources
- Brad Englert
- Grace Gavin
- Dr. Yaniv Zaid
Transcript
Jess Dewell 00:00
I am in this role. You are in this role. We are in this role. Together, we can find the answer.
Brad Englert 00:05
As the leader, your job is to empower your organization. And if you don’t set that expectation, you’ll never get there.
Grace Gavin 00:14
We simplify communication down to two things, which is being honest and being open, and those two being different things.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 00:21
I always tell managers, you need to be Batman and not Superman in front of your employees.
Jess Dewell 00:25
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by at the Bold Business Podcast. We are normalizing important conversations.
Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems. More importantly are going to be, what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using?
This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind, and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out. Maybe you’re ready to scale.
Maybe you’re going through reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages. So hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.
Announcer 01:16
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast, where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.
Jess Dewell 01:30
Here’s the deal. We’re always in a rapidly changing world right now, and it’s probably going to continue that way. Change is going to happen faster and faster.
So being able to harness the potential within our teams, to empower them, to be proactive, and to think about the problems that they’re solving more creatively, impacts not only how the way we work together happens, but it also unveils and uncovers places of growth potential that can take that uncertainty that you may be feeling and give it a little more shape, a little more direction to get you from step to step.
I’m so glad you’re here with us on the Bold Business Podcast. I have a fantastic panel today, and guess what? Instead of me introducing them and listening to my voice all the time, I’m going to get you to them right now.
So I’m going to ask each one of you to introduce yourselves and say your name, of course, what you do, your title, and something that makes you really glad to be here to have this conversation. How about this? Brad, would you start us off?
Brad Englert 02:38
Sure. Brandon Lloyd. I was with Accenture for 22 years, 10 years as a partner.
My focus was primarily higher education. So my clients were University of Michigan, Illinois, Ohio State, Columbia Vanderbilt, Cal State, even Texas A&M. And after I happily retired, I got a call from my graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin.
They needed some IT help, and I became the chief information officer for seven years, eight years altogether. And I really enjoyed that. Currently, I just wrote a book.
I’m doing a lot of speaking about the book and really enjoying that mentoring people.
Jess Dewell 03:23
Oh, I’m so excited that you’re going to bring those book insights right into this conversation and all of your experience over the years. Thank you for being here, Brad. Grace?
Grace Gavin 03:32
Yeah, my name is Grace Gavin. Excited to be here too. I’m the co-founder of No Honesty.
That’s K-N-O-W for those that are listening. Also co-author of the book by the same names. And just quite simply, what I do is I help teams have healthy communication.
So I am excited for this conversation to not only share a little bit about my perspective on it, but more importantly, learn from the other people on the panel too and hear your thoughts. Thank you.
Jess Dewell 04:02
All right, Yaniv, tell us who you are.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 04:04
Yeah, I’m Dr. Yaniv Zaid. I live in Israel, 48 years old, married for the second time with three kids. And I’m an international expert in marketing, sales, public speaking, negotiation, and persuasion.
I wrote 11 books, the all bestseller books, translated so far to 12 languages, including a sales bible, creative marketing, public speaking. One of our missions in life is to help individuals and businesses to communicate better, to persuade on another, to sharpen their ideas together. So I’m very happy to be here talking about how to call people to action and how we can communicate better with our colleagues and our employees and our managers.
Jess Dewell 04:40
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast. Talk about some amazing guests that we’re going to dig into and talk deeply about different topics. And maybe we’ll sidetrack a little bit.
That might happen here and that’ll be fun too, because we do tie it back to the bigger topic overall. Whether you’re solving a problem, whether you are just learning, whether you are coming with an intention of leaning a piece of insight to spark something that you’re working on, we’re glad you’re here. Don’t forget, if you like this, we want you to engage with us.
Everything will be on the show notes page or in whatever platform you’re listening to this in. There will be some extra notes so you can reach our speakers, all of the resources, and come visit the website reddirection.com for any Bold Business Podcast that you would like to listen to. All right.
So here we go. We’re going to jump right in everybody. We are going to be talking about problem-solving, creativity, forward-looking.
And my question, when I was rereading it, as I was sending everything out, I went, cool, this is a big enough question. I think we’re going to get three very different answers. So now we’re going to test my hypothesis and let’s see, we’re going to start.
And each of you will have a couple of minutes to answer this question. And then we’re going to dig into this conversation even further. So audience, those of you listening and watching, here’s our question.
How can we empower our teams to be forward-thinking and proactively identify potential areas for growth, maybe even through creative problem-solving. And to start that, I’m going to start here. Hey, Brad, I want to know, how can we empower our teams to be forward-thinking and proactively identify areas for growth through creative problem-solving?
Brad Englert 06:24
As the leader, your job is to empower your organization. And if you don’t set that expectation, you’ll never get there. I inherited central organization, IT organization, 330 people at the University of Texas, $40 million budget.
But it was a culture I inherited was a fire drill culture. So they rewarded heroics and swooping in and saving the day instead of proactive customer service. And so I set out to work with my direct reports based on feedback from the campus to articulate our values.
And our values were going to be transparency, honesty, collaboration, working with our customers, not being the know-it-alls in the ivory tower. And it took probably eight to nine months to, and different techniques to finally get that culture to change where we were rewarding proactive customer service and no longer rewarding heroics. And some of the heroes fell by the wayside, which freed us up to change our culture.
Jess Dewell 07:41
Wow. Thank you. Okay.
What you’ll learn about me, everybody is that I’m going to want to interrupt and stay here before we actually get to the next section. So this is really exciting for me to practice waiting. Okay, Grace, I want to know how can we empower our teams to be forward-thinking and proactively identify potential areas for growth through creative problem-solving?
Grace Gavin 08:06
Yeah, I am right there with you on the waiting because I already had some questions around that. So I will be practicing it with you. We can do it together.
So my thoughts around this, I’ve got a lot, but let me try to condense it the best I can. And I think the way to help a team be forward thinking, be proactive, have creative problem solving, most importantly is to give them the permission to do so. And to make that be clear that not only is this an expectation of the organization, but this is what we hope for that you’re here as somebody who is not just ticking off boxes and saying, yep, this is done for the day, but how could I improve this moving forward?
And in the framework that I teach through No Honesty, we simplify communication down to two things, which is being honest and being open and those two being different things. So the honesty you can think about is the me, myself and I side of things. We define it as being truly and freely yourself, speaking into what you want and how you feel.
That’s really important. That’s to me, that’s the creative problem solving, proactively identifying areas. But how you get to that is by, as a leader and by helping your other leaders and really everybody in your organization as a whole, but you have to, as a leader, you have to start first, is developing being more openness.
And openness as I define it as listening without reservation, putting your needs and wants on pause for someone else. And stating that very clearly of that is what I’m here to do. I promise I’ll be honest with you.
I promise I will be open to you. And what that really does is it sets aside any anxieties that an employee might be coming into a conversation with or into an organization with, because maybe they were somewhere else that didn’t encourage this, that they were expected to shut up and do their job. But what we know when we can better develop as leaders, the ability to listen to our people, and we can help them feel heard and respected, they are 4.6 times more empowered to do their best work. And my thing is always keeping things simple, tangible, and implementable for my clients. And to me, it doesn’t get more simple than that. It’s just developing your ability to listen to your people and encouraging them to use their voice and making that explicitly clear.
I think that’s how you get to that. And there’s a whole lot of other tiny little recipe pieces that we can put in there and talk about, but that’s the bottom line to me. Thank you.
Jess Dewell 10:32
Hey, Yaniv, how can we empower our teams to be forward-thinking and proactively identify potential areas for growth through creative problem-solving?
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 10:41
So I agree with Grace and Brad. I think I will add one key element is a personal example. I think when you’re a leader in your companies, then people look up to you.
Your employees look up to you. They would like to know what you think and how you react to problems and challenges. And you need to inspire them to share stories with your background and expertise.
Stories, because people can relate to stories. The stories can be personal stories. They can be case study stories.
They can be stories about, let’s say, things that you did well and also failures. People like also to hear about failures. Most managers, they don’t like to talk about their failures, just about the success, because they think this is the way they will inspire people.
But actually, people are more inspired by stories about the failure and what did you learn from these failures. I always tell managers, you need to be Batman and not Superman in front of your employees. Now, what is the difference?
Because Batman and Superman, they’re both superheroes and they both look like human beings. But Superman is actually from another planet. So if people think that you are from another planet, so they never be like you, they can’t solve problems like you.
But for example, if Superman will provide a workshop on how to fly and I will sit in the first row and buy a ticket for the VIP ticket and they will tell me everything, go to the highest roof, highest building, check the first step and they will do everything he says, I’m still going to fall because he’s Superman and I’m not. But Batman can tell you a story, can tell you a workshop how to fly, I can tell you I was just like you, even I had the worst life because the Joker, he murdered my parents and I fell into a cave and I was afraid of bats, etc. And then I taught myself how to fly and then I can relate to him.
So if you are honest, we talk about honesty. So if you’re honest with your employees and you share stories, how did you solve problems and they can relate to you because you’re human. Like them, just with more experience and then they can learn from you and then they are more open to share problems and also to solve problems.
Jess Dewell 12:29
Okay, there you have it. We could have this be the podcast, but no, there’s going to be more. Three powerful viewpoints with a lot of wisdom and a lot of depth with which we can go.
And now since I know Grace, you also have some questions. Do you want to start us off with a question?
Grace Gavin 12:46
I’m curious when you were talking about turning around the culture and the organization that you inherited, did you talk through that with other leaders and the expectation? Because what caught it for me was the fact that you had said it took eight to nine months. And sometimes the people that I’m talking to, they expect these culture changes to happen within a month or within a lunch and learn.
And they just say, hey, we’re being firefighters, like you said, and we need to be more customer-thinking. And then they dust their hands of it and say, we did it. And that I have never found to be true.
So I’m curious how you managed expectations around that and made a plan around it.
Brad Englert 13:25
I think the first thing was articulating what the values of the organization are and those values were not rewarding heroics. And then I wrote a blog once a week for eight years. The blog would talk about our values.
It would talk about successes. It would talk about failures. We would apologize when something went wrong.
At 54,000 students, 21,000 staff and 4,000 faculty, what could possibly go wrong every day? Quarter million devices hook into the network. So I would apologize and say, I’m sorry this happened.
This is what we’ll do to prevent it from happening. And please accept our forgiveness. Please give us forgiveness.
Just reinforcing those values. We’d have quarterly meetings where we would bring customers in and they would talk about what they wanted from us as a service organization. I had my direct reports make sure that they were expecting their teams to do that.
I would say of my seven direct reports in those nine months, three of them changed out. They were not able to make that transition. And I was able to hire in people who really were embodiment of customer service and proactive. Thank you.
Jess Dewell 14:47
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.
Announcer 15:01
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast, hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary.
Number two, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at reddirection.com.
Jess Dewell 15:31
Values seem to be incredibly important. And my question to you is, what is one of the values that drives you in your role for you to show up every single day to face the problems, to listen, to hear, and to do the deep work to keep looking forward?
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 15:49
People need to understand the bigger picture, the mission for the company, the vision for the business for me. My vision is I would like to inspire people to communicate better, to improve their sales abilities, marketing abilities, public speaking abilities. And when I sit with a client, I don’t treat it like it’s one-on-one meeting and I get paid.
But my mission is to help this person sell more books or spread these messages out there. Or if it’s a business that I share the same values with, I would like this business to grow. Now, I think the companies that they survive the most years, the companies that they share their vision with their employees.
I can give you a few examples. I prepared it, for example, Nike. Nike, their vision is we inspire, motivate, and empower athletes and fitness enthusiasts.
Now, you actually sell shoes, right? But no. If I think just I sell shoes, then I think I just go to work.
I don’t have the bigger picture. I don’t have the vision. Or for example, eBay.
eBay, their vision is to empower people and create economic opportunity for all. So you don’t just sell to me online, online marketing, online shops, but you help people all over the world develop their business and can provide food on the table. Okay, stop talking like that.
So if you can share your vision with your employees, and you can, like Brett said, you can already hire the relevant people who share your vision, then you can create great things.
Grace Gavin 17:08
Yeah, for me, I think about one of the things that really guides me is integrity. Or said another way, doing what I say I’m going to do. And I think I hit the mark 80 to 95% of the time, depending on what’s going on in my life.
And I think about, okay, where did I not hit it? What can I learn from that? Where did I do it well?
And what can I learn from that? And applying the same things to my clients, to my business, where they say, we didn’t find out about this big, huge problem, because somebody didn’t feel like they could come forward to us. Okay, that is a failing, and that didn’t align with our values.
But what did we learn from that? We learned maybe that we have a leader in that department that doesn’t create that kind of environment, that isn’t following the values. Or we had somebody come to us and was able to say that, and we learned that these set of leaders do exhibit those values.
And so let’s reward that, let’s walk through that, and let’s work on that. So it’s the examining, it’s taking it a step further of not just saying, okay, that was bad, let’s move on. But, okay, let’s understand that a little bit more.
Let’s figure out how to get better moving forward.
Brad Englert 18:21
Yeah. The guy who founded Lastic Pickles said, I want good news fast and bad news faster.
Jess Dewell 18:28
Yeah. That’s a good quote.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 18:33
And at the end of the day, another quote, the Dalai Lama says, if you lost, then don’t lose the lesson. So if you already had a failure, let’s learn from it for the next time. In high-tech companies, there is a line of lecturers.
It’s when entrepreneurs telling other entrepreneurs about failures, and people love it. The twist is that usually the story is, in my first company, I lost $100 million of investors. My second company, I got bankrupt.
And my third company’s PayPal or something like that. So usually it’s a failure success or something like that. Usually you don’t hear failure, failure, failure.
Today, I am homeless, living with my parents or something like that. But again, people love the stories of failures. People love to be inspired by it.
Also, if you read books, the resurrection part of the books, if they fell and rose and fell and rose again or something like that, then this create the best set of books.
Grace Gavin 19:19
I think that brings us back, almost full circle, back to the question again of how do we empower our teams before thinking and proactively identify potential areas for growth through creative problem-solving, is let’s look at our failures and what did we learn there? Because as human beings, I don’t know where, at least in the culture that I live in Michigan, in the United States, there’s such a drive for this image of perfection. But we as human beings, the one thing we will never be is perfect.
So the more I think to Yaniv’s point of talking about the failures of looking through that helps us get more comfortable with it. We have something here that’s fantastic company. They do events and they’re called Failure Lab.
They have these prominent community people come up and they will tell the stories of their failure and they don’t go to the heroic side of it. They just leave it at the failure point. I am addicted to those events at this point because it’s so curiosity driving of how did they, we know they’re successful now, so how do they get to that point?
But it’s also so uncomfortable to a certain degree because you just have to sit there and you don’t know the rest of the story. And you, for me, I remember what it feels like in those moments of my own failure. And then I see these people up there who are successful and think, okay, if they’ve gotten through a failure and I’ve come to become who they are, these are some of the big, huge stories of failure in these people’s lives.
Then what does that mean for me? Then I can get through that, that this failure leads to something else like you’re talking about. One failure, one failure, then PayPal.
I’m not saying it’s only going to take two failures to get you to a huge business like that, but if we stop, if we get frozen in the failure, especially if our teams get frozen in the failure and heaven forbid they don’t admit to it, they aren’t honest about it, we’re headed down a very dangerous path very quickly.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 21:15
I agree. And if you look at social media, in social media, everything looks perfect, right? It’s there.
There is the phenomenon of Facebook illusion. Everyone’s life are perfect. All parents are perfect.
We just take pictures of our kids when they won a medal or when we play in the garden with them, not when they fight. And we only take photos with our spouses only when we have romantic moments, not when we fight or something like that. So if you look at your neighbor’s Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, it all sounds perfect.
So you think only my parenthood is lousy. Only my marriage is lousy. Only my business struggles.
Everyone else is so beautiful. And all the Facebook pages, the business pages are filled with success and achievements and everything. So it’s very refreshing to not to be so perfect.
I think in 2025, people have something like fake radar or bullshit radar. They know when you’re authentic and when you are not. So it’s very important.
Authenticity is very important for individuals and for businesses.
Grace Gavin 22:11
That’s actually one of the things I teach my clients. One of our practices is called fake quite simply. And I think about it as we can project that facade, sure, but it’s not going to get us anywhere.
We’re not going to solve anything. We’re not going to be creative, certainly. And what’s the point?
It’s like a mirage. It’s not real or it’s a cardboard cutout of you. Try to have a conversation with a cardboard cutout version of somebody.
It’s not going to go very far, but we do it all the time. And then we have in our organizations, our people doing it. And then they’re not going to be creative.
Jess Dewell 22:43
No, they won’t be creative. It actually comes from this. I actually think there’s an ingrained behavior here.
Think about companies from the 50s and then the 60s and then the 70s and then the 80s. We started to see some change. And then we saw some change in the 2000s.
And now we saw a lot of change in the early 2020s in a lot of different ways and about who owns the knowledge and who’s supposed to have the answer. So one of the things I’m hearing is this is actually part of a paradigm shift that we are working toward over a period of time of, I am in this role, so I must have this answer, to I am in this role. You are in this role.
We are in this role.
Grace Gavin 23:22
Together, we can… There’s this paradigm shift going. Absolutely.
Stephen Covey’s latest book, The Speed of Trust or something like that, he talks about the command and control leadership of yesteryears to the trust and inspire. And to me, I see in the middle of that, we’re trying to get to that, where I have clients that I’ll work with that are still under the command and control. We’re trying to shift to the trust and inspire.
And back to what Brad was talking about, it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, I think the interesting thing that you said there, Brad, is you had three people who couldn’t make that change and who ended up leaving. And that is sometimes…
I see that happening a lot, where people just can’t make the leap or they don’t want to. They’re not comfortable with it. How did you end up…
Did they self-select out, or did you end up exiting them out?
Brad Englert 24:11
Two self-selected, and one was asked to leave. And the self-selecting, they had this mantra from the prior regime of there’s no money, there’s no money, there’s no money. I have a $40 million budget.
There’s money. It’s how you prioritize. And if you have a customer-facing idea that’s backed up by data, nine times out of 10, we’ll pull the trigger on it.
And it took us 40 years to get this way. Let’s make it better. But I had someone who was dishonest, and I had to let him go.
And I let him go right before the winter holidays, which I’ve never done in my 40-year career. But he was not being truthful.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 24:51
I think in order for companies to survive for many years and prosper, they need to establish themselves to changes. For example, if you’re talking about sales and marketing, then the sales and marketing are changing rapidly. I think today, 2025 is about inspiration, not desperation, because there were years…
I’ve been doing this for 22 years, that the best way to sell to someone is to hurt, to talk about the pains, to set the problem before the solution, talking about the hurting the client in order for them to buy your product and service. But today, we’re talking about inspiration. We’re talking about improving their lives, something like that.
So you’re talking about an old-school marketing person who’s still doing the old methods. It won’t work today, or it’ll work less. So if you try to change a company’s vision, then you need to adapt yourself all the time.
And we need to take people that are willing to adapt themselves and don’t they learn everything. Because sometimes I come to workshops, and let’s say a workshop about marketing, and some employee comes to me and says, I know everything. You don’t need to teach me something.
So immediately, I know this is the guy who needs the most lessons, because probably this is the approach. I know everything. They send me to this workshop.
I don’t need to learn everything. I think the opposite. Every expert is also a student, is maybe a first-year student.
So we need to adapt ourselves all the time and to keep learning all the time. And the world is changing, the economy is changing. We need to adapt also our values and our mission accordingly.
Brad Englert 26:18
So one of the things that was a challenge for me is I had a boss who was old-school, and it was command and control. And he had this hilarious open-door policy, which you learned after one open door that he would beat the messenger until the morale improved. So none of my people ever raised anything to him or me related to his area.
And then he had people working for him who tried to run my area. And it was like, you’re an accountant. You’re not an IT person, with all due respect.
And my boss would send me emails, clearly written by my peer, because I run the computer, so I know what the calendars are. I could see that he and the boss met two minutes prior to me getting the email from the boss, which was clearly written by him, because it was this cloud of words. And I finally had to confront the boss and say, okay, I’m responsible for my organization.
He’s responsible for his organization. It’s your job to hold him accountable for his organization, me for mine. And if you want him to run my organization, then you don’t need me anymore.
So basically, I threatened to quit if he kept it up. So sometimes you’re in a situation where you don’t have rainbows and butterflies. So you have a boss who you have to work with, and you just have to find a way.
Jess Dewell 27:58
I appreciate that perspective immensely, because unless we speak up, unless we’re using our voice, unless we stand our ground, the other person may not even know that they’re overstepping. And I like to give a lot of people space to be who they are, and it’s up to both parties to go, this is going on, and it doesn’t feel good. The word doesn’t feel good needs to speak up, because the other person is not a mind reader.
Grace Gavin 28:24
Yeah, they’ve probably operated this way other places, and maybe people have felt similar ways, or maybe they haven’t, and nobody spoke up. So I always think about it as giving them just a little bit of grace if maybe they don’t know. And so let me make them aware, and then once they do know, let’s hold them accountable to it.
Brad Englert 28:41
So I’d ask people, use your words. If you need something, tell me. And then the other phrase I used, your people are not mind readers.
So if you’re the boss, you need to tell them what you want. And if you’re working for someone, you need to tell them what you need. And same thing with customers.
Customers can’t read your mind. You got to use your words. I had a client who wanted me to come take over this troubled project, and I said, large research one university, 50,000 students.
I said, I can come help you. It was in October, but next summer I have a vacation planned to Australia. Last year, I canceled the vacation to Australia.
It was my 25th high school reunion. I was an exchange student. I’ve already bought the tickets.
My family had the passports. Next summer, I need to go on this vacation. I promised my family.
So we get to May, and we’re starting to make milestones and getting some progress. We’re meeting with the president, and the president, as I reminded you, the last three months, I’m going to be away in June. Diane will be in charge, and his hands started shaking.
And I just went, whoa, slow motion, canceling my vacation. When the CFO and provost said, wait, Brad, wait a minute. And the CFO said, Brad, when Mr. President, when Brad came here, he said he had this long planned vacation. It’s important for his family. We said we would commit to let him go. We should let him go.
So my client supported my vacation. So I got back. Diane did a great job.
I didn’t check email or voicemail. 10 years later, I’m having dinner with the CFO and his wife and my wife. And we talked about that.
He goes, when you were away, we were scared to death.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 30:30
The number one tip that I always say for sales and marketing is to love your customers. So I think the number one tip for managers is love your employees. And as speakers, love your audience.
Because if you don’t love people, it’s very hard to provide personal attention, to really listen to them, to really know about them, to really care about them, to really share your ideas and stories with them. It’s very difficult to teach people to love other people. But in order to become a successful manager, to inspire people, and for me, a successful manager is also a mentor, that people can relate to him and they look up to him or to her.
So you need to love people. And what you said is that he cared about you, thought about you, not as a number, but as a person, as an individual. And also he had an interest that if you go to your vacation and you have a great vacation, that you will come fully motivated.
And if you will cancel your vacation, then you will hate them for life. And maybe you will do a lousy job. So even in a moral aspect and also in a human aspect, his decision was great to allow you to go to Australia.
Grace Gavin 31:28
I love the love aspect that you’re bringing into it. And I also, I’m curious about how you said it was Diane that you locked in control, how she felt going through that too. Because I think part of this question to Jess is, are we always providing the answers for our team?
Are we always the one who has to have the creative idea and this is going to save the project or this is going to boost revenue or things like that? But are we giving our team a chance to step up and to say, here’s a problem we’re addressing. What do you think?
And what I heard in your story there, Brad, is, listen, I’ve got this plan. It’s happening. I’ve committed to it.
Thankfully, I had somebody who loved me well and stepped up and helped me stay committed to it. But then I think about Diane and your story too. And what did that do for her?
Maybe she was scared, but maybe she learned something completely new about herself and taking that over. I have somebody who said, we were talking about something similar like this. And she said, I had it forced on me because they had this huge, big event that they had planned.
They were going to have hundreds of people and she had, the leader had been pretty involved, but was trying to be hands-off and let her team do it. Us leaders, we like to have our hands in things. And she said, I didn’t have a choice because I woke up the morning of the event and I got a positive COVID test.
And so I couldn’t do anything and I had to let my team run it and they did a better job than I did.
Brad Englert 32:52
Sure.
Grace Gavin 32:52
That’s huge.
Brad Englert 32:54
Just asking the question, what are your goals and aspirations to your people, to your customers, to peers and influencers, to even your vendors? I had vendors who bent over backwards to help us be successful. And I had vendors who were very transaction-oriented and didn’t give a damn about us.
And I got rid of them. And I nurtured those who asked, what are we trying to achieve? And then they would figure out how they can help us get there.
Jess Dewell 33:21
I’m your host, Jess Dewell, and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success.
Announcer 33:37
Focused on growth? Listen to more programs like this, which support the challenges and opportunities you are working with right now. Search Bold Business Podcast for the key terms at reddirection.com or your preferred podcast listening app.
Jess Dewell 33:53
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast. This is an amazing panel where we’re talking about empowerment. We’re talking about problem solving.
We are talking about how do we stay engaged and present and aware, empowering others while we face the amount of change that we have today. Glad you’re here. If you have anything else you want to add to the conversation, now is the time.
Drop it in whatever chat you’ve got going on, the comments, your reviews. We want to hear it because we are here to make this conversation normalized. Okay.
Ready to go. Because what we’re talking about here, hopefully we’ll introduce you to something new that you haven’t thought about or a new way to approach to really capitalize on that potential you already have to really tap into the strengths you already have to move forward through change. This has been such a great conversation so far.
One thing that keeps coming up is longevity, right? This is long-term change. And that’s what we’re talking about.
So we’re talking about maybe small habits that build. We’re talking about modeling behavior and encouraging others. We’re talking about how do we have to change to really allow others to fill the same space.
And so I’m very curious from each of you, a time, regardless of what role you played in the change, what was the strength that you leaned into that you already had that you brought to the table to be able to have this conversation and keep the goal moving forward, especially when it got, it could be tedious, but a struggle or just in that uncertainty, the real mess of it that you can’t see too far from the beginning and not quite enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel place.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 35:43
I am optimistic by nature. I always keep the positive side of things, even if things are bad. And I look at the historical aspect that if you run for long-term distance, then you look at it, you’ll say, okay, so this year was tough or this month is tough, but let’s look up ahead and try to be positive all the time and try to be optimistic.
I think if managers are optimistic and positive, not like the media, for example, not what maybe employees hear from other places, they can inspire people to move forward. For me, it’s very helpful in bad times or bad situation that I always remember it’s something that happened to me a few years ago, it was bad. And then years later, I laughed about it.
So I say, if you laugh about it in the future, let’s start laughing now about it and stay positive.
Grace Gavin 36:29
Jess, that’s a really tough, good question. But I think about the first experience for me that comes to mind is when I was transitioning out of a previous role to step more into what it is that I’m doing now. And we had a fantastic team member that we wanted to elevate and bring up into my position.
And so like many other leaders out there, I’m sure it was a really tough at first process for me, because I had to mentally let go of all of the things that I was doing and teach her the way that I did it. And then I would always have to remind myself to emphasize, but you have to figure out how to do it your own way and working through that. And what I leaned into and what I learned is that we’re a couple of years out of that transition now, and she’s still on our team.
She’s fantastic. And sometimes she’ll still come to me and ask me about the role. And I’ll have to tell her more about this than I do.
The business has evolved. It’s changed already. You’ve changed some things in it.
You’ve got some great improvements under your belt. I need you to trust yourself in this. And I need you to make the decision that is going to be best.
Because I found myself just off the top of my head giving her the answer, because I knew it and whatever. But that, I realized wasn’t going to help us innovate. It wasn’t going to help her learn it.
It was just going to bring her back to ask me another question, which I’m totally fine with her asking me questions. Happy to be a helpful leader in that way. But I wanted her to develop the trust in herself.
And the reason I could spot it so is because I recognized that same lack of trust that I had in myself when I first started in the role. I’ve never done anything like this before. This is completely different.
But I’ve got a good head on my shoulders, and I can problem solve, and I can figure this out. And I saw the same thing in her. We promoted her for a reason.
She’s fantastic, and she can problem solve and figure things out. If she does not get it, she is going to do the research. She will figure it out.
She will find better solutions than I have found for our business before. She knows what we’re doing. She knows what we’re going after.
She puts the filters on it. And so it was really leaning into me to help encourage the trust in herself that I had to work to develop in myself too. And it’s still an ongoing journey, but I think we’re getting there more and more.
Brad Englert 38:51
One thing I was able to do, or I did when I started my role, to set the expectation that I wanted my direct reports to make decisions and be empowered, is I gave them a copy of a classic Harvard Business Review article, literally from the 70s, about who’s got the monkey. And it was about this leader who noticed that all his direct reports were out golfing on the weekend and leaving early, because they would take their problems and put it on his back, and he had the monkey. So he taught himself to, every time someone tried to give him a monkey, take the monkey off and give the monkey back to his direct reports and say, no, you need to, you’re empowered to solve this.
And so he was able to leave and go golfing on the weekend. But it was a way to convey what my expectations were in a fun way. So I’d encourage your listeners, it’s Harvard Business Review, who’s got the monkey.
It’s a classic.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 39:58
What you’re talking about is just like parenting. As parents, there was always the dilemma between doing everything for your kids and telling them exactly what to do and letting them be their own, be independent. So I try to raise my three, I have three boys, so I try to raise them to be independent.
And always you have the dilemma between making their food and showing them how to go to everywhere and showing them what to do exactly all the time. And it’s sometimes, you know, it’s against the instinct of letting them be independent. It’s always a dilemma, kids and with your employees as well.
Grace Gavin 40:30
Yeah, there’s so many parallels.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 40:32
Yeah, yeah. And if you let people be independent, like you said, Gracie, they step up, they step up. Actually, in most movies, the heroes are stepping up.
They’re not natural heroes. Sometimes they just cut into situation. Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Rocky and Rambo and Harry Potter and Neo in Matrix, all those stories, there is some guy that just living their life, Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, when just people say, you need to save the world.
And you just say, no, no, I’m just a humble guy. And eventually he saves the world. So he finds a way and he finds his inner powers.
So this is exactly what we need to do with our employees to let them step up, let them shine, provide, like you said, Grace, provide the atmosphere, the ecosystem for them to shine, let them do mistakes and learn from mistakes. And then they will be better, better, better than us even. But a great manager doesn’t care about if the employees are better than him or her, because again, you run the orchestra.
So I don’t need to do everything all the time. OK, so if, for example, if Brad goes to Australia, his interest is that Diane will be even better than him. I don’t want to put someone, someone, you know, will do a lousy job while I’m on vacation.
I would like to do someone even better than me.
Grace Gavin 41:43
That brings to mind for me the idea, too, we talked about perfectionism before, but also the sometimes false idea of productivity. If you don’t see me working, then I’m not doing anything. But I think a lot of leadership is all of the things that go unseen is letting your people fail or helping them think through a problem where the best leaders are the ones that look like they’re doing nothing because their entire team is doing it.
Now, that becomes a little bit dangerous as a leader from the productive standpoint. If you have leaders above you or owners or whatever that value that still I got to see you working type of thing, because then it looks like you’re doing nothing, but you are orchestrating it all. And if you were to be pulled out of that, things get a little bit more messy.
But again, back to the question, how do you develop more creativity in your people? You got to get out of the way as a leader. If you’re in a leadership position for the ego side of things to be able to say, I’m the VP of this or founder, whatever it might be of X, Y, Z.
That’s not real leadership to me. Some of the best leaders I’ve seen are those that are in the lowest positions of an organization that say, I think we got to think about this or this is our value. Let’s point back to there versus a leader that’s there, maybe just for the title, for the ego of it.
Jess Dewell 43:03
These are all really great points. And it’s interesting because I could go in one of many directions. I’m going to stick here.
We’ve been sharing great stories, awesome experiences, our own, others, the dynamic that we see from our perspective. And one of the things I think would be really interesting to try and leave with our viewers and our listeners is that I know from all of the experience right here, there’s probably proactive clues that show up that say, Hey, it’s time to make a small change to take advantage of this. It’s time to go, Ooh, somebody is asking to be, to be able to grow in a certain way, or we need to grow in a certain way.
Where can we find that we haven’t really tapped into in our organization? So do you have a tip or an approach that you could share so that we can actually, or specifically around the clue, what’s the clue to be able to go, Hey, spend more time on this right now.
Grace Gavin 44:04
And when you say more time on this, do you mean the issue or creating the creative mindset? Either.
Brad Englert 44:13
One thing that Accenture did really well, and part of their culture was mentoring and coaching. And even as a senior partner, you were expected to teach in a training class on their global training center, but they would give us field promotions. And so when I was a senior consultant, they would field promote me to manager and have me manage a team and a project when I was still a senior consultant.
So it was a no risk, try it out. They were charging, you know, a manager rate. I was only being paid a senior consultant rate, so making the money.
And then as a manager, I tried out the senior manager role. Then I tried out the associate partner role, and then I tried out the partner role. My associate partner role was, I was in another state doing electronic medical records system, but it’s something I’d done before as a senior manager.
I was the associate partner responsible for the whole state and project. And so it was just a risk-free way to stretch and try it out. And so instead of getting promoted and failing, you’re actually field promoted.
And then if it doesn’t work out, it’s really no harm, no foul. I might say, let’s not, and the thing I want to do.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 45:32
Brad describes, happens a lot in startups. I consult my startups and startups. They’re usually a few people do everything.
A few entrepreneurs do everything. They do several roles. And only when the company grows, then become problems, because then you need to set an example and set rules.
And then you recruit more people. And then you have a problem of who is doing what. Usually when you are a small startup and you try to evolve, then people step up because you need to do many things, not just what you came for, but everyone do everything, something like that.
Grace Gavin 46:04
I thought about this and took it a little bit of a different way. I think about what are the problems that keep me up at night, or I keep thinking about, or I just can’t figure out quite how to solve. And I bring those to my team and I say, Hey, we need to do some better integration for clients.
And we need to figure out how to get this process more sticky for them. I’ve got some thoughts, but what else are you all thinking? Because it’s not going to just be the genius brain in here.
I’ll say genius in quotes, that’s going to find the right solution. Because if it’s just me, then it’s only going to work for just people like me. And so I would encourage leaders to, if there’s a problem that you’re wrestling with, you can’t quite find something, pull people in for good old fashioned brainstorming and get a whiteboard or get a big sheet of paper, write it up there.
And the thing that I always have to work on that I have to develop in myself is to not say it won’t work because of that, or that’s too much or things like that. It’s just let everybody word vomit, encourage that, create some more openness in there to create that trust of people. So bring a problem you’re wrestling with to your team and see who’s ready to jump in and dive into it with you.
Brad Englert 47:20
On their team players and their despots, you need to be a team player and you’re not the smartest person in the room, but I have seen leaders who think they’re the smartest and people come in supplicating to them and people hate that. Be a team player.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 47:37
I believe that if you are the smartest person in the room, you need to change room because you always need to develop yourself and evolve and learn and to be a student. Yeah. And we talked about solving problems.
So yeah. So if you let people solve problems, if you share your thoughts and would like to listen to them, because sometimes managers, they like to talk against your instinct. You need to learn how to listen to people in order to be a great leader, a great manager.
Okay. So four of us, we usually, we can talk for an hour just by ourselves and we need to listen to one another and to share ideas and to ask questions. It’s maybe it’s against our instinct.
Like you said, you practice to be quiet or practice to ask questions or something like that. Managers need to, against your instinct, to listen to others and get new ideas. And if you mentioned to hire A-list players or A players, then let them work because you recruit talents to the company.
So if you recruit talents, then you need to let them work and not to recruit someone good and then tell them what to do. You hire them because they know better than you in a few things and you need to let them do their job to be the best version of themselves.
Jess Dewell 48:42
Okay. So I want to know what is your biggest takeaway from this conversation today?
Grace Gavin 48:49
I got it. I’ll jump in first. I think my biggest takeaway when I’m learning from all of you is that to really answer this question of how do I help my team step up?
How do I help them develop these skills or whatever it is, the question of what work have you done as the leader? Have you made it possible? Have you created the ability for them to step into it?
Have you helped them develop the skills? Have you helped them field test things and turning the mirror back? Because it can be so easy as a leader of people to point fingers and say, my people aren’t creative enough or they’re not coming up with solutions.
But if you are their leader, then there’s, what is, what do they always say? One finger points at the other person, four are pointing back at you. So that’s my big thing.
I guess it’s three. I got to figure out how to count, but one finger points at them, three are pointing back at you. That’s my big takeaway from this.
Brad Englert 49:45
And it’s also creating a safe ecosystem in your organization where it is okay to raise issues. That’s your job as the leader to make it safe.
Dr. Yaniv Zaid 49:59
Yeah. So I wrote many things. So I’ll just read some to be honest, to be open, fill your lap, to get out of the way.
And the best one is fake you.
Grace Gavin 50:12
Jess, I’m going to turn the question on you. What’s your big takeaway?
Jess Dewell 50:17
In all honesty, I have two sets of notes. Everybody knows I write notes, right? And they’re all in different colors.
There’s so many notes. I’m glad I have different colors because I’ve written over the other colors to fit into one. I actually noticed ways that I would like to improve my panel discussions in the future.
So totally unrelated to this topic, I’m going to just be very transparent and say, there are some really great things we did naturally that I know, looking back, I can help looking forward to make really good conversations. So I have gratitude for that. Now, back to our question, empowering, forward-thinking, proactively identifying.
One of the things I’ll, I’m trying to pick one. I think my biggest takeaway was actually because we all talked about it some and Brad stated it very clearly, which is how low risk can we make it to try? And because one of, if we’re already in high pressure or we find ourselves there and everything is always changing, when we can make it as low risk as possible, it makes it a little easier or a lot easier to try something out.
And to the point, I can’t remember who said fail. It was a pickle company. Our quote, it was also Brad, right?
I want to know, I want to know what’s failing faster, right? Yeah. So that was my biggest takeaway.
All right, everybody, you are listening to the Bold Business Podcast until next time. What is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important.
It’s important because yeah, there are going to be how-tos. Yes, there are going to be steps. Yes, you’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down.
I wish I wasn’t doing this, and I could actually take action on that right now. But guess what? You’re not.
So, engage right now because that one thing you want to share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.
Announcer 52:36
Jess hosts the Bold Business Podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance, and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host, Jess Dewell. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com.
Thank you for joining us and special thanks to our post-production team at the Scott Treatment.