99: Apply the 4 C’s of Leadership with Andy Neillie

08
Apr

Andy Neillie is an adjunct professor, best-selling author, and the owner of Aqua-Tots Swim School of Central Texas. He’s also the principal of the Neillie Leadership Group, where he helps organizations turn managers into leaders. We talk about the four leadership necessities, why communication is the most important skill in leadership, and best practices for holding tough conversations. 

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Apply the 4 C’s of Leadership with Andy Neillie

Our guest is Andy Neillie, the owner of Aqua-Tots Swim School of Central Texas. He is also the principal of the Neillie Leadership Group. He’s an adjunct professor at the MBA program of Concordia University, Texas. And he’s also a bestselling author of The Golden Principles. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Well, thanks, Steve. I’m excited to be with you and be able to invest some in your audience. Thanks for the privilege.

It’s awesome to have you. And I’m very curious about the things that you bring to the table. So let’s start with your entrepreneurial journey. How do you end up owning a swim school franchise as well as doing other things? So it seems like you’re a good delegator because you have your Neely leadership group. You’re also a professor, you write books. So tell us about your journey.

Well, I suspect like some of the folks that may be listening in, I’m not sure when I got done with graduate school that I purposed to be an entrepreneur, Steve, at some level, I just couldn’t work for other people very well. So I bounced around a bit. That probably is not the best thing for a career, but two things happened over the last, really at this point, 25 years. One, I worked for a couple of really bad bosses, and it just ignited in me that nobody should work for a bad boss. And so the Neely Leadership Group was the fruit of that frustration I had with poor performing managers.

You know, the Blues Brothers, if we remember that old movie, they thought they were on a mission from God. In some respects, Steve, I’m on a mission from God that is no bad bosses. And then, as you know from our prior conversations, the interesting thing about Aqua-Tots of Central Texas is we are simply a franchisee of the largest network of swim schools in the world. But once again, it’s almost an accidental stumble. Our daughter was one of the original Aqua-Tots when a young lifeguard showed up in our backyard pool more than 25 years ago and taught our two-year-old and a bunch of kids from the neighborhood and church to swim.

Mr. Ron and Miss Jane, his girlfriend, the two lifeguards taught swim lessons in our backyard swimming pool. Fast forward almost 30 years later and that little two-year-old daughter of mine is now in her 30s. And Mr. Ron Sierra is the master franchisor of the largest network of swim schools in the world, Aqua-Tot, and one of my dear friends. Our little girl was the flower child in their wedding. Ron and I lived life together. We became best friends. He turned his backyard model into an indoor year-round shopping-based center model. And about 12 years ago, we had relocated to Austin.

We lived in Phoenix where he was. About 12 years ago, he reached out to us and said, Andy, you’re in Central Texas. You know the business. You helped me craft the business plans. Why don’t you bring it to Central Texas? And so, Steve, we did. And the proud thing I’m to share with you, even in last year where we were still impacted by COVID for the first several months of the year, our small swim schools in Central Texas did almost 100,000 swim lessons for little kids. So I kind of backed into both halves of my life, but I backed in with passion and love what we’re doing.

That’s awesome. So how do you share your time? How much of your time still goes into Aqua-Tots and as opposed to your leadership?

Yeah, I mean, in a perfect month, it’s 50-50. It never quite works that way. Last week, I was on the road for Neely Leadership Group all week long. I started my week in Des Moines, Iowa, and I ended my week in Ontario, California, but that was the longest week of flying for me in the last three years. Obviously, during COVID, none of us were flying much. I started to travel on behalf of clients again. But now I’m back in the office most of this week, and I’ve already been hard at it with emails.

We’re expanding and adding our fifth location, and so I’m working with general contractors and lenders and equipment and the supply chain constraints that you’ve talked with some of your people about and how to manage those types of things. So I’ve got my Aqua-Tots hat on mainly this week. I had my Neely leadership. But Steve, it’s not a disconnected thing for me. When I’m working out of my home office on Aqua-Tots, I get to lead a team of managers. When I’m working with the Neely leadership group team, I get to help other leaders lead managers better. And so for me, it’s a seamless weave. I don’t have to turn one brain off to turn the other brain on. I love what I do.

No, it seems like you are practicing, you must be practicing what you’re preaching because you’re already opening the fifth location on your LinkedIn. I was still at the third location. I’m glad I didn’t mention it in the intro. So congratulations for that. So let’s talk a little bit, let’s switch gears here and talk about the blueprint, the leadership blueprint that you came up with, which you called the four leadership necessities.

Right.

What are these and how did you discover them?

So Steve, when I was doing my doctorate studies, I was also flying on behalf of Neely Leadership Group clients. As I told you, I had a couple of bad bosses early on in my career, and it just ignited a fire within me as not just what makes a bad boss a bad boss, but what makes a good manager turn into a high-performing leader? Boy, a wealth of books have been written on that. People have been thinking about good servant leadership from Marcus Aurelius and Jesus Christ. There’s probably nothing new under the sun.

But as I tried to distill what was my voice around that, I recognized good leaders, not just managers, but managers that desire to turn themselves into high-performing leaders. There’s a simple construct. It’s not easy to execute, but there’s a simple construct. First of all, they are people of conviction. They’ve got vision. Their people have their heads down, but if they’re good leaders, they’re looking up and out. You and I’ve talked about that a bit because of your passion and the book you just published and where you’re going, trying to influence more and more people. Conviction is the first thing that separates a leader from a manager and a team player.

And then the other thing is the level of competence. I work a lot with frontline managers who are in their first promotion. They had been a team member, maybe a team lead. Now they’ve got seven to ten people underneath them, and they need to execute. That’s why they’re in a leadership position. So they’ve got to bring some competence to the table that allows them to have their team excel. So that’s the second one, conviction, competence. Steve, the third one, well, the third one I don’t think should surprise any of us, particularly in 2022 with all of the news, it seems to roil the press regularly.

If you’re going to be a good leader, you know, honesty, fairness, not self-focused, the character of a leader is what sets them apart. And then the fourth necessity of the four leadership necessities, we’ve got conviction, we’ve got competence, we’ve got character. The fourth one, Steve, I wrestled with for a long time. How do I capture what I see happening in people like you that are leading teams well, others that are leading teams well? For a while I called it communication, but it was more than communication. For a while I called it correspondence because they were aligned with their people.

And finally, Steve, I recognize what’s really going on. It’s an old word, but the word covenant, and while we don’t use it much anymore, the word covenant is a powerful word. In fact, here in the state of Texas, where I live, if you’re gonna get married, you enter a marriage covenant, and that entails two aspects. The first one, obviously, is the personal side, the love and affection. There’s a deep personal relationship. But also, if you’re legally going to be married in the state of Texas, there’s an official form that you have to fill out and send in to the Secretary of State.

There’s a formal relationship as well as a personal relationship. And when I finally got my hands around that, I recognized that’s what good leaders do. They are for their people and they also organizationally lead things well. So the simple construct is conviction, competence, character, and covenant. Now, it’s a simple construct, but it’s similar to your pinnacle construct where I think the devil is probably in the details at times.

That’s fascinating. As you were explaining these four C’s, I thought about the three elements of rhetoric, of speech, where you have ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is the character, pathos is the passion, the conviction perhaps, and then the logos is the, maybe it’s the competence, it’s the content of the speech.

Yeah, could be.

Yeah.

Well, that’s interesting, Steve. Most business people don’t really know the three rules of rhetoric. But again, I would say my leadership necessities, I have not discovered anything new. I suspect good leaders over the years. Norman Weisskopf, Schwarzkopf, during Desert Storm 20 years ago now, talked about to lead anybody into battle, they’ve gotta be a person of character and competence. Others have talked about the three Cs. The thing that I layered on when I recognized this concept of covenant, it puts the whole package together.

Yeah, no, I was going to say that I really like that because that moves the individual leadership into an inter – maybe it’s an interdependent leadership where the leader is not just standing out there and making a speech and making it a one-way communication, but it’s actually a two-way communication. It is a relationship, you’re all in the boat together. So I love that concept. So how does that show up in practice? So when you are building your company at the Aqua-Tots, Texas, now fifth location coming up. How do you leverage these C’s in order to make this company grow and prosper and have a healthy culture?

So the bad news about that is I live in Texas, which has statistically some of the worst news around childhood drownings year in and year out. And so Steve, part of my job is to remind everybody how important our work is. And you know, you and I are on this Zoom session together in the late spring this year. We’ve already had more than a dozen childhood drownings here in Texas, and we typically end up, because of the hot season in front of us and the water access that everybody has with the Texas coast and all of the rivers and streams and backyard pools because of the heat.

We typically end up with between 75 and 90 little kids lose their lives every year in backyards, on lakes, in bathrooms. Steve, I hate that, but I’m also passionate about that. And so part of my voice into our very busy managers who are struggling with staffing and dealing with parent complaints and working with chemicals and HVAC systems and keeping the place clean and doing search engine optimization. They’ve got their heads down doing all these things. And I meet with our management team by a Zoom call every Tuesday. And we spend an hour talking about the business. And I often am bringing them back to the why of what we’re doing. It’s a hard job. Boy, at times it’s a thankless job.

You have little children crying behind the class, just like little kids cry when you put them in a safety seat in the car. It’s a challenging job, but it’s gotta be done. Have kids crying, you have parents that have unreasonable expectations. You’ve got supply chain disruption for chlorine and acid. It’s a hard job. Part of my job is to remember and remind them regularly that we are doing important work, that I tell them regularly, there are kids, Steve, who haven’t drowned in Texas because of the work we did. We’ll never know their names because they weren’t in the news. So I think a part of that.

Now, here’s the interesting thing, Steve, and perhaps some of your audience will be interested in this. While I was a high school swimmer, I was never a very good swimmer. I was always the guy that was like at the end of the bench. We’ve been around water our whole lives, but I did not have a burning passion for water safety 15 years ago. But I had a close friendship with Mr. Ron, the lifeguard, and I knew what his passion was. And when he invited my wife and me to join the movement here in Austin, I started getting my hands around it. And Steve, I will say, I’m a case study of somebody where passion grows.

When you invest yourself in something, passion grows. I think I’ve always been wired to be passionate about good leadership. I also am passionate today about kids and water safety. I’m kind of annoying any time I go to a group setting and there are parents with little kids. You know, after we do the pleasant introductions, I’m talking to them about what are they doing to keep their kids safe in the water. And so part of this was a good lesson for me that, you know, we read a lot on LinkedIn and other places around, you know, you gotta be a passionate leader and you watch motivational videos and sometimes people just don’t have it.

I wanna let your listeners know, passion grows when you invest yourself and get connected and dive deeply into something. If it’s a worthwhile business, if it’s a worthwhile NGO, if it’s a worthwhile association, in my case, if it’s a worthwhile franchise and you fully dive into it, your passion will grow. I am pretty passionate about water safety these days.

Passion grows when you invest yourself and get connected and dive deeply into something. Click To Tweet

That’s awesome. It’s obvious it shines through. Your passion shines through. I completely agree that the more you dive in, I’ve experienced it myself. And to me, what drives that is my curiosity. So if I’m curious about a business, I’m going to want to learn more about it, and then I’m going to get more passionate, and then I can bring it to my client. And it’s an important thing that we choose our clients, our client businesses that we can be passionate about. We can be passionate about.

I would be very passionate about working for a tobacco company or maybe a spirit company, but I’m definitely a passionate about professional services. So, that’s the conviction piece. What about the competence and the character? So, are these things have to be there? So, it’s all about hiring and selecting the right person, or is there something, do you have a process for bringing this out of people, getting them more pumped up about building their competence or you training them and the character piece. Is this something that can be nurtured at this stage? 

Great question. Let’s talk about them both briefly. In fact, I suspect you should be the one that’s being interviewed when we talk about the competence piece, the execution, your models and the models that you’ve taken a look at. Here’s the thing that I recognize. People that have moved into management, that aspire to move into senior leadership, they need to be competent broadly, have competence broadly in three areas. People, projects and profits. And when they drive those three, well, and I think that’s some of your language. I may have learned that language from you. So what they’ve got to recognize is Marshall Goldsmith’s old book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

People that have moved into management, that aspire to move into senior leadership, they need to be competent broadly, have competence broadly in three areas. People, projects and profits. Click To Tweet

The competence that’s required of a leader is different than the competence that’s required of a frontline worker. Steve, I shared with you briefly when you and I chatted a while back, I was leading a training session for a Fortune 500 company a number of years ago, and I saw the impact of compromised character in one afternoon within 10 minutes destroy a person’s ability to lead. Just let me tell you very quickly in fact my perspective I ended up calling it. We all know we’ve all heard and we’ve seen on the news the idea of an interstellar black hole. You can’t see the black hole, the way they see them out in the heavens is through very powerful telescopes.

The competence that's required of a leader is different than the competence that's required of a frontline worker. Click To Tweet

They see the things that the black hole is impacting around it. That’s the only way you can really see a black hole. Character flaws are like personal black holes where the things that we think are hidden, they have a way of showing up. So I was consulting with this firm, gosh, more than 10 years ago now, Steve, and I was leading a discussion around sales management. And we were talking about the WIFM, that language that all of us are familiar with, what’s in it for me. And I had a flip chart up behind me. And so I just turned around and wrote W-I-F-M on the flip chart.

And at that point, one of the two or three managers that was in there with their frontline workers started laughing. And he leaned over and whispered to somebody. And I have to tell you, Steve, I’d like to think I’m good at what I do and I can manage content and inspire people and manage a training environment. I lost control for a couple of minutes and I couldn’t quite tell what was going on, but there was this ripple of disgust, this ripple of disappointment, and Steve, I’m almost embarrassed to tell your listeners, but here’s what came out that afternoon. There’s a website that has similar initials to WIFM that nobody should be on. But this manager was on it without anybody knowing it.

But when he saw me write that up, he connected dots that nobody else would have connected. He brought it to the forefront. All of his team realized what he had been about when he didn’t think they knew what he was about. He lost the ability to lead that team right there. And I think you and I could tell stories to your listeners of any number of business leaders who may have been competent, may have been people of great conviction.

They may even have had part of the people equation, the covenant equation, right, but they were not fair, they were not other-oriented, they were not honest, they were loose and free with facts and reality, and ultimately it compromised their ability to lead. So I became pretty convicted about that. You and I talk, my faith is very important to me, and this is undoubtedly anchored in my strong conviction that there’s got to be a moral underpinning to this. But just as importantly, in the practical world, this manager lost his ability to lead that day. Just like that.

Interesting. What about the covenant? How does that work and what kind of covenant and what does it? Yeah. What is the commitment that the leader makes to the group? Obviously, you can’t guarantee lifetime employment, promotion, I mean, it’s often out of the hands of the leader. What is the content of this covenant?

I will tell you, Steve, that’s a good question. I think I’ve wrestled with this necessity more than any others because of what you just said. You know, when you and I spend time on LinkedIn, boy, particularly in the last couple of years, all over LinkedIn are these inspiring business leaders that say, hey, I treat my team as a family. We’re all family. And on the one hand, I appreciate what they said, but Steve, if we’re in business together, we’re not a family. We are a team competing to win. And we may not even be competing against our competitors. We just may be competing against ourselves last quarter or last month or last year.

We’re not technically speaking a family, but we are a team that’s competing to win. And once I understood that, I began to realize that the best leaders, it is about the personal side. And so self-sacrifice, this whole idea of servant leadership that Robert Greenleaf brought to the market, more than 30 years ago now, and the concept of stewardship where I have a greater good that I’m serving, whether it’s shareholders or stockholders, or whether it’s the greater community, I have a responsibility as a leader to be viable into the future. And so part of what I’ve got to do is lead my business well, which means I need to lead my people well.

Leaders have a responsibility to be viable for the future by leading their business and people well. Click To Tweet

And I think particularly in the last couple of years as the hardships around us have really focused in on this powerful concept of workplace empathy. I think a lot of us are thinking about that a lot more than we ever have. My balance to business leaders is a workplace empathy does not mean the chickens run the hen house though. You still need to be a wise steward. You need to serve all of your constituencies. There is a dynamic tension in the concept of covenant that I don’t ever think goes away.

A couple of months ago, we made the very difficult decision to let go of one of our managers. We’d had a whole series of hard conversations for a series of months. The manager’s performance was not C minus Steve, but it was not a performance and and I have a responsibility as the owner of this enterprise that’s passionate about helping kids get safe in the water to drive toward doing our very best. When the day we we let that manager go, that manager was accusatory was angry, said we had violated all the core values that we that we espouse and and you know, it was hard to hear that because I had done what I thought was a really good job of balancing this concept of covenant.

The manager ultimately came back a few weeks later and was in a much better place, but it’s a tension. I mean, your listeners need to recognize one of the jobs of a leader is always communication. It doesn’t matter what’s on your business card in some respects, if you’re in a position of leadership, your real title is Chief Communication Officer.

I don’t have a great memory, and so sometimes I have to treat our team members like I would treat a customer where I take notes on names and birthdates and anniversaries and things so that I can show them I care. So there is that whole side that Brene Brown has reminded us so much of in her many books on empathy. But there’s also the tension of I am communicating toward where we’re going. We’re not technically a family, we’re a team.

So this covenant is relative to the mission that you’re on and it’s basically, it’s a set of, maybe it relates to the conviction, the competence, the character, then we are going to be a successful team together. But it’s a two-way house. You have to deliver that. And then I, as your leader, are going to deliver that as well.

Yeah. I think that’s a good way to look at it.

So in terms of communication that you just mentioned, how important that is, there are three conversations that you talk about that leaders have to have. So what are these conversations and what are their purpose?

Yeah, so the first one is the hard conversation. In fact, in some respects, I will say that clear demarcation between a manager and somebody who aspires to be a high-performing leader is they’re not afraid of the hard conversations. They don’t avoid the hard conversations. A lot of people don’t enjoy them, but if they’re necessary, you have them. The productivity conversations, the write-up conversations that we’re going to put you on a plan conversations, or just the hard conversations about things that aren’t the way they need to be.

Managers get the easy conversations, team members get the easy conversations, leaders get the hard conversations. And so the very first conversation that defines you as a leader is that hard conversation. Are you willing to call somebody into the office? Are you willing to get on a Zoom call with somebody and make good eye contact with them and talk about their performance, talk about their behaviors, the hard conversation. The second conversation is the developmental conversation or what, you know, the language today really is the coaching conversation. How are you helping that person? This isn’t a hard conversation.

You’re not putting them on plan, but you’re not letting them be where they’re at. And so how are you investing in them skills and behaviors to improve their performance? The best managers and leaders I work with, I really encourage them to have at least a once a month meeting that is a discrete, different meeting than any other meetings they have with their subordinate that I call the FAST coaching conversation. And you and I talked a little bit about this, the FAST conversation. There’s an acronym there about focusing and aligning and next steps. And I’ll make a resource available to your folks at the end of our time together if they want a little bit more. But a 20 to 30 minute monthly conversation specifically focused on skills and behaviors.

So if the first conversation is the hard conversation to move away from something bad, the second conversation is the developmental, fast coaching conversation to improve moving into the future. What I recognized is the third conversation is probably the most important conversation and it should happen all the time. I call it the threefold affirmation conversation. And it really takes us back to the concept of trust and trust deposits and trust withdrawals. You and I as leaders, Steve, we just need to find a way to help people celebrate little successes and big successes, particularly in today’s environment when, you know, people are beat up by the time they get to work.

They’re beat up by the time they make it into their home office and turn their team’s microphone on for their first call of the day. It’s hard out there. There have been a lot of withdrawals. You and I need to be purposeful about making deposits. And I call it the threefold affirmation conversation because I really want to think about how can we make three deposits anytime anybody does something well. The first deposit, hey Steve, you really nailed that. Good job. How did you do that is the second one. So first one is I celebrate Steve’s success. The second affirmation is, Steve, tell me what you did. And he gets to rehearse it again in front of me.

And then if it’s appropriate, it might even be, hey, Steve, we’ve got our meeting on Tuesday afternoon with the other managers. Can I turn it over to you for a couple of minutes to tell them how you solve this problem that we’re all struggling with? And so in some respects, that one thing that my team member, Steve, did well, we just got affirmed three times. I affirmed him, I asked him to affirm himself in front of me, and then if appropriate, I asked him to tell the story for other people around him so that they can learn from him.

The threefold affirmation conversation. And while it’s probably got less of a model around it, I think it’s probably the most important of the three conversations leaders have with their team members. And once again, you and I talked, I’ll make a resource available to your folks at the end of your podcast where they can download an ebook that’s got a little bit more definition and some worksheets around each one of those conversations.

I like that. It’s a really good mental checklist, basically, you know, what is the hard conversation that we have to have, we can’t avoid it, it’s not really fun, but it always to even the person that we are coaching, because we always to give them the feedback so that they can improve, then also help them grow and figure out how they can grow and how we can have them see that. And then the affirmation and essentially sharing the best practices across the team and giving the spotlight for the person so that they get the reward from their peers of having done a great job. It’s a great mental checklist to have.

Well, and going back to the hard conversations for a minute, I did a bunch of research around this several years ago now. There are 13 best practices for holding a hard conversation. Steve, I struggle with that, because I think you and I both know, people can remember three or four or five. And so you always try to build a model of three or four or five. I was being really honest what I was seeing out there in the market I was seeing out there in research I was seeing out there in clients.

I was working with and if you’re gonna have a hard conversation, you know there’s there’s just a baker’s dozen 13 things you need to keep in mind things like, you know, get all your ducks in a row. Make sure that you’re well-prepared Don’t die on any small hill. Sometimes it’s okay to lose a battle if you’ve got the bigger war in mind. If it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen, document things. Once again, if your listeners are interested, I’ll be glad to share in that e-book those 13 best practices.

Okay. Well, I’m sure many of the listeners will be interested. How did they find out about some of the goodies that you mentioned? Yeah. Also your book, I didn’t get time to talk about that, The Golden Principles with a nice golden retriever on the cover. So give us some reactions.

You know, I don’t have the audience that you have, Steve. I’m pretty passionate about what I do, but I’m a pretty smart guy. If they just send me an email, I’ll be glad to send them the e-book. It’s andy, A-N-D-Y, @neillieleadership.com, and I’ll be glad to drop them that e-book. My book, The Golden Principles, as you know, Steve, my wife and I have rescued dogs for years. We’re on our ninth and tenth golden retriever right now. And gosh, about eight, no, 10 years ago now, I had a book publisher in the back of the room where I was doing a keynote and he and I started talking.

I told a story about one of our dogs and what I learned from Redford about being a better leader. And he said, you got any other dog stories that would make a good book? And it did. So The Golden Principles, Life and Leadership Lessons from a Rescued Dog is available on Amazon. Once again, if somebody reaches out to me, I’ll be glad to send them a copy of it. The ebook will be free. I’ll just drop that in the mail or I mean, drop that in their email. So yeah, I would love to help out any of your followers that I can.

Okay, that’s awesome. And the Neillie Leadership Group, the website is Neillie Leadership Group.

Yes, Neillie, N-E-I-L-L-I-E. So you can go to andy@neillieleadership.com or neillieleadership.com website, yes. In fact, there’s a number of resources there. The ebook is on there and there’s some other resources if they wanted them.

Okay, so check the show notes. It’s gonna be all in there as well. So Andy, it was great chatting with you. You’ve got some really powerful ideas around leadership and some easy mental frameworks that people can follow. So thanks a lot for coming on the show and sharing it with us.

You bet, my privilege.

And for those of you listeners, if you enjoyed the show, please don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, subscribe on YouTube and stay tuned next week because another exciting entrepreneur with a framework is going to show up and share it with you. So thanks again, Andy, for coming and have a good day.

Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it.

 

Important Links:

This entry was posted in . Bookmark the permalink.