June 23, 2025 • 55 mins
What if leading through change didn’t have to feel like chaos, but could be an opportunity for personal and organizational growth? In this episode of Seek Go Create, Tim Winders sits down with Brad Englert—former Chief Information Officer at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Spheres of Influence—to discuss the secrets behind authentic business relationships, navigating generational differences in the workplace, and how faith and humility shape powerful leaders. Whether you’re an aspiring leader, a seasoned executive, or simply searching for ways to make a bigger impact in your organization, Brad’s hard-earned wisdom and real-world stories will inspire and challenge you. Listen in as they explore how investing in relationships can transform the way you lead and thrive in complex environments.
"'You don’t build a house without a blueprint. You don’t write a program without a design. Invest in planning and relationships the same way." - Brad Englert
Access all show and episode resources HERE
About Our Guest:
Brad Englert is an accomplished author, advisor, and former Chief Information Officer at the University of Texas at Austin. With over 40 years of leadership experience spanning Accenture and higher education, Brad specializes in guiding large-scale organizational transformation, strategic planning, and mission alignment. He is known for his expertise in building authentic business relationships and mentoring the next generation of leaders. Brad’s insights have been shaped by decades of hands-on experience leading high-impact teams and driving innovation in complex environments.
Reasons to Listen:
- Insider Lessons on Leading Change: Hear former University of Texas CIO Brad Englert’s first-hand stories about managing large-scale transformation and building authentic relationships in organizations as big as UT—offering strategies you won’t find in a textbook.
- Real-World Advice for Building Influential Relationships: Discover why “networking” isn’t enough, and get actionable tips on creating and nurturing meaningful, mutually beneficial business connections that can drive your career forward.
- Unfiltered Perspective on Leadership Across Generations: Gain rare insight into navigating generational differences, communicating through challenges, and how humility and faith quietly anchor Brad’s decades of leadership—from mid-level management all the way to the C-suite.
Episode Resources & Action Steps:
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Spheres of Influence: How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships: Brad Englert’s book, featured prominently in the discussion, serves as a practical guide for leadership and relationship-building in complex environments. Available on Amazon and via Brad Englert’s website.
- Brad Englert’s Website - For a free sample of the book, more information, and to connect with Brad directly, visit: www.bradenglert.com/seekgocreate (customized link for Seek Go Create listeners).
- Workshops by Brad Englert - Brad offers workshops on leadership, influence, and relationship-building, which he mentions as an extension of his book and mentorship.
Action Steps for Listeners:
- Invest in Authentic Relationships, Not Just Networking - Prioritize building genuine, mutually beneficial relationships over transactional networking. Take time to understand people’s goals and find ways to support...
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
if you show up and you're trying tosell to an organization you haven't
bothered to read their look at theirwebsite and understand what their
mission is and their values andtheir vision, you're wasting my time.
I would've vendors come to me and theydidn't bother looking at my website.
It's like, well, you'd know ourstrategic priorities for the last
(00:20):
eight years are on my website.
you didn't even bother lookingat it, you're wasting time.
What if Navigating Change didn'thave to feel like chaos, but
(00:41):
could actually be a calling?
This week on Seek, go createthe leadership journey.
I'm joined by Brad Engler,author, advisor, and former Chief
Information Officer at the Universityof Texas at Austin Big School.
With decades of leadership experience atboth Accenture and in higher education,
Brad shares hard-earned wisdom onleading large scale transformation,
(01:04):
aligning it with mission and how Faithquietly informed his professional path.
His new books, fears of Influenceis a blueprint for anyone called
to lead with clarity and purposeand complex environments.
If you're a leader facing change,uncertainty, or high stakes decision
making, conversation is for you.
(01:26):
Brad, welcome to Seat Go Create.
Thanks for inviting me.
Great to have you here, man.
You got so many exciting things onyour resume and within your book,
but let's get started here and, whydon't you pick, would you rather
answer do you do who are you?
Well, I am going to gowith the Who are You?
(01:49):
Because it's really different than,the last 40 years of my career.
And, I retired from Accenture.
most partners retired50, so I was ready to go.
And then two years later, the universitycalled me and they wanted some help with
an IT strategy and hour week pro bono.
So they didn't even pay meuntil three months later.
(02:11):
And then I was halftime sixmonths later, full-time, and
I was there for seven years.
IT Chief Information Officer.
But now, after I retired the secondtime, I really wanted to help
people, grow in their careers.
I enjoyed that.
Through my 40 years.
It was part of the culture atAccenture was to grow your people.
(02:32):
And I actually look back at 22 yearsof annual reviews and I looked at how
my partners helped me become a partner.
And yeah, they did a reallygood job giving me stretch
roles and things like that.
So I had all these stories and Ithought, and I'm still mentoring two or
(02:52):
three people a year, but you know, thatdoesn't scale and I can't clone myself.
And so I thought, well,I'll just write a book.
And so I got together with mypublisher and the editor was terrific.
She says, just inventory all your stories.
And I came up with like 40 to 50 storiesand then we just sent it a whiteboard
(03:16):
and looked at how can we organizethese They fell into relationships,
business relationships, and therewas boss, direct reports, executive
leaders, all your staff, and thoseare your relationship closest to you.
And then there was customers, peers, andinfluencers and strategic vendor partners.
(03:39):
And the stories just fellinto those categories.
And, she was really good.
She says, don't write one pageuntil you have the full outline.
Well, you don't build ahouse without a blueprint.
You don't, write aprogram without a design.
Yeah.
and I, since the book has come out,I've created a couple of workshops.
just did one this week,a one hour workshop.
(04:00):
And there are a lot of young peoplethere who are early in their career,
and I just wanted to help them.
Learn the secret of the importanceof investing in relationships.
And, you know, people talk aboutnetworking all the time and you know, to
me it's superficial and transactional.
in 40 years I've never been toa networking event where I got a
(04:23):
customer out of it, and I had onefellow, I had his business card.
a week later he is calling to askme to donate to his not-for-profit.
So I don't even know who you are.
That would be a no.
a lot of people who are my vintageare giving it to their adult
children so they can, 'cause theydon't teach this in business school.
(04:44):
and so I've just, reallyenjoyed, helping people grow.
is this kind of a mission for younow at this stage of your life?
Yeah.
it really is.
I've been successful.
I've been fortunate, very fortunateto have really good mentors over the
years, and it's a way to pay it forward.
Hmm.
That's good.
so what's interesting is thatsometimes relationship people
(05:08):
aren't considered technical.
And technical people aren't considered
Mm. Mm-hmm.
tell me, it seems as if I'm sittinghere talking to a guy that CIO,
technical background, whatever.
And we're gonna go over a littlebit of background in just a moment.
'cause I got some questionsfrom kind of way back.
But I mean, are you a relationshipguy or a technical guy or both?
(05:33):
Or where do you lean?
Well, probably lean moreon the relationship side.
I had to learn enough of thetechnology so I could translate
to my customers or my executives.
I did a lot of, translationat the university.
they're brilliant PhDs, whoare deans and presidents and,
(05:55):
but they don't know technology.
And so I try to use simple wordsto convey, some complex, terms.
But I had to learn how to program.
I had to learn how to design programs.
I had to learn how to manageprogrammers and designers.
And the technology changes over the years,but the principles are really the same.
for those that might be listeningin, y'all heard him say 40 years
(06:17):
in, business, and the audienceknows I'm in my early sixties.
I'm guessing you're in your sixties.
is that accurate?
I will be, 70 in June.
Congratulations.
So that's coming up.
That actually might be right aroundthe time this releases, so it we'll
Excellent.
a birthday celebration for you.
(06:38):
Excellent.
so one of the things that, I had aconversation recently with some clients
that I'm working with, and we were talkingabout some generational differences
that we're noticing in the workplace.
Mm-hmm.
and some of it is related tocommunications styles and some
of it is related to work ethic.
(06:58):
Some of it was related to making, bothof us, or we were quick decision makers
and we were noticing some passivity andyounger generations we were dealing with.
You mentioned that you've gotpeople you interact with that are
giving book to their adult children.
Mm-hmm.
Talk about just some generational stuff.
(07:19):
Some of these things, I mean, I'm readingthrough and I'm going Yeah, that's right.
But some of this stuffcould be new for people.
They've never heard it.
So just let's start havingconversations around the generational
differences in some of these items.
Well, certainly at the university Ihad 330 people in my organization and
(07:39):
all the way from student workers to,people who were ready to retire and
been at the university for 40 years.
So I had to deal with all levels,and I found that there really.
Three principles that I tried tofollow in all those relationships,
(08:00):
including my students, which wasunderstand their goals and aspirations.
what's your major?
What do you wanna do?
And, what kind of work do you want to do?
I would have interns working for mewho I would help them get an internship
somewhere aligned with their work.
Second is setting andmanaging expectations.
(08:21):
I was bad at it early in my career.
I got much better atit later in my career.
But, two phrases came up in the book.
One is, if you're a manager,people are not mind readers,
so you need to use your words.
And then the other phrase is, if you're adirect report and you need something from
the manager, you need to use your words.
(08:41):
And so I tried to be veryclear on when I asked someone
to do something that I would.
Discuss, you know, whendoes it need to be done?
You know, what's reasonable,what does it look like?
And not just quickly, say, oh, godo this and have them flounder.
And then the third principle isgenuinely caring about their success.
(09:03):
I would spend time walking the halls, Icall it management, by stumbling around.
And, I would talk to people, I wouldwalk through the help desk area where
all the students are, you can be verypopular when you bring a bunch of
donuts to the, help desk area or pizza.
they're always starving.
just to get to know, whatare people trying to achieve?
(09:25):
I had someone who, a direct report,I said, do you wanna be a CIO someday
or you wanna be a technical person?
they said, well, I reallyenjoy the technical work.
I said, well, great, we need you.
And then another, womanwanted to be a CIO.
I said, well, when I go onvacation, I'm gonna put you in
charge and see how you like it.
(09:46):
So, just taking the time to ask people,what are they trying to achieve?
Who doesn't want to share that?
And then being good about ifyou can help 'em, help 'em.
And if not, sometimes youknow someone who can help 'em.
So, you don't have to.
Help everybody.
(10:07):
I think in the book you saidsomething to the effect, I may be
getting this wrong, but you somethingthat communication is a duty.
Mm-hmm.
it's part of our duty to do that.
I'm not sure that everyone looks atthat, and that could be something
that might be slightly generational,even though I notice that in a lot of
arenas, people aren't really proactivewhen it comes to communication.
(10:28):
How has your approach to communicationchanged over your career and maybe even,
especially during challenging seasons?
I actually think that challenging seasonsis when we learn what we're made of.
Hmm.
how, just give maybe a, you mentionedthat you were better at it later, so a few
Yeah,
let's go ahead and
(10:49):
I,
maybe when you weren't so good,because I think that helps the listener
because they're probably sitting heregoing, man, I'm not where Brad is.
yeah.
some of the challengesyou've dealt with there?
Well, saying yes to everything,
you know?
Yeah, I, I, I was really bad about,canceling vacations and, working too
(11:10):
much and, you know, I loved what I did.
So part of it was self perpetuating, butI, when I was, a manager, I found a book
called Managing Expectations that waswritten by a psychologist who applied her
psychological insights to it world, andit could be at any organization really.
(11:33):
And one of her techniques was justsay, whoa, not say no, just say whoa.
And literally the next day, mytype A personality boss, she
calls me up at five o'clock.
I'm trying to leave to havedinner with my wife and.
and she, I need a white paper.
(11:56):
A white paper.
And, you know, it justsounded really urgent.
And I was scared, but I said, whoa.
And I said, when do youneed this white paper?
Oh, let me check my calendar.
I need it in two weeks.
Okay, how many pages do youwant this white paper to be?
(12:16):
three.
I was thinking 10.
do you have an example of a white paper?
Oh, yeah.
Ask David.
I did one for XYZ Corp 10 years ago.
Well, guess what?
I went home and had dinner with my wife.
Now before I learned to say, whoa,I would've called her canceled
dinner, upsetting her and me.
I would have stayed up all night,written a 10 page white paper, and
(12:42):
delivered it the next day and getyelled at, this is not what I want.
And it's like, lose, lose, lose.
And.
Just by being clear and taking,creating some mental space and
time to really understand you.
You say you're a quick decision maker.
(13:03):
I actually, people like my managementstyle 'cause I'm more of a plotter.
And so they'd come in with these,problems and they wanted to rush to
the solution and I said, well, ittook us 40 years to get this way.
Let's understand what the problem is.
one of my techniques wasintentional foot dragging where
I didn't rush to the decision.
(13:25):
and I would drag my feet.
I had a boss who.
Didn't want me to buybottled water for my staff.
Now we were in buildings that werebuilt in 1930s and forties, lead pipes.
I had one building where therewas sediment in the glass
when, my staff would do it.
So I wanted to buy their water.
(13:47):
it was not that expensive.
but he was a CFO andthey're penny pinchers.
a peer of mine wouldn'tbuy water for his staff.
they wanted to drag me down tothe lowest common denominator.
even cut the water in myoffice and the coffee.
So I brought my own water and coffeefor seven years, but I basically
ignored the boss for years.
(14:11):
then the new boss shows up, hegoes, what's his water thing?
And he stopped it.
I dragged my feet for seven years.
I wonder if actually when youmentioned that you're a professional
foot dragger, I almost saw thatyou might need to trademark that.
That actually could be a good,leadership or management approach
and, it is real interesting.
(14:31):
I often will move quickly I haveto force myself to slow down.
Right.
the people, really for my spiritual walk.
Mm-hmm.
I interact with the Lord, andsometimes on prayer time, the Lord
says, would you just slow down
Yeah.
little
Mm-hmm.
I, but before we get too far into here,
Mm-hmm.
to back up 'cause I like tounderstand kind of how people, I
(14:54):
like to understand their journey.
Mm-hmm.
as you're sitting here for those,watching the video, I think over your
left shoulder, you've got some bookson Australia and I read somewhere, I
think this was correct, that you werea high school teacher in Australia.
that's correct.
I was an exchange student in Australia,and I was there when I was, 17 years old.
(15:17):
And then after I graduated undergraduate,I went back to the same school
and taught for a year and a half.
And it was really fun because thestudents knew, I knew what they knew.
So even though I, as a yank,
day ahead of him
they knew where things were happening.
So, I've been back with the familyprobably every five years or so.
(15:38):
one year I was back, I said to myAustralian mom, you know, I'm the
Chief Information Officer at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.
She looked at me and said, Ididn't think you're that smart.
I said, I wasn't when I was17, but I went to college and
then I went to graduate school.
(15:59):
Wow.
so you went over there as an exchangestudent and then later you went back.
what part of Australia were you in?
just north of Sydney, about a hundredmiles is a valley called the Hunter
River Valley, known for their red wines.
this was a rural town called Maitland,which is, a lot of agriculture.
It's all built up now.
(16:19):
I've been to that wine country.
Oh, awesome.
in Australia and NewZealand's reason I'm asking,
Nice.
had some friends and we went up to
I
wine country and I thinkwe spent the night up there
Australia's a beautiful place.
What are some
Mm.
either, either from the culturalexperience or the teaching experience
you learned during that season ofyour life that you've kind of taken
(16:42):
with you for the rest of your life?
Mm-hmm.
you got from that experience?
Well, I think that's where mydesire to help people started.
It's as you're a teacher, you'vegot, I had, ninth grade all boys.
Well, how do you keep themfrom tearing the room apart?
(17:02):
And I was teaching science and thenI had, you know, 11th grade girls
and boys, English and histories.
But the younger guys, Ihad to really engage them.
And, you know, I was teaching scienceand I remember one, guy came up to me at.
Lunch, you know, on the playground.
(17:22):
He goes, what's, what's gonnahappen in science today?
And I said, I'm not gonnatell you you have to wait,
but just, you know, to see people growand, you know, you have, there's a direct
correlation and how hard you work as ateacher to how well your students do.
(17:43):
And I could see that every day.
you mentioned in your principlesearlier you talked about,
genuinely caring for people.
Hmm.
always had that?
Is it something that'sdeveloped over time?
I know you're, I know you'vegot a faith component to your
Hmm.
What, where, where has that come from?
Or has it just been a build orgive, give some background on that.
(18:06):
So where do you think that came from?
Your genuine caring for other people?
my parents,
Hmm.
Tell me more.
you know, they were, really good about,looking out for people, in our church,
taking care of the people who didn'thave what we had and kind of teaching
me early on to be more sensitiveto the fact that, we were lucky.
(18:32):
Not everyone is that lucky,so, be sensitive to that.
Did you grow up, I guessin a church environment and
Yeah,
faith was always afoundation of your life.
yeah, yeah.
United Church of Christ.
And did I see from the Midwest.
I know you've spent, we'll talk aboutyour role at University of Texas soon,
Mm-hmm.
I know you spent a lot of timein and around that Austin area.
(18:52):
You're still there, butI think I saw Midwest.
where are you originally from?
Where'd you grow up?
I grew up, outside of Chicago, asuburb, crystal Lake, Illinois.
it was a small town,probably 10,000 people.
now it's of course all built up.
And then my undergraduate schoolis shyer College, which is in
a, at the time, a small ruralcampus in Mount Carroll, Illinois.
(19:18):
And really, when I got to finish up myteaching in Australia, I knew I wanted
to go to graduate school, literally put amap of the US out on the kitchen table and
said, okay, I don't wanna be cold anymore.
So I'm going somewhere southof the Mason Dixon line.
(19:39):
been to Austin before I've beento Florida, and I thought, well,
Florida's a little too humid forme, so I'll go, I'll go to Austin,
and that's how I ended up here.
So you went to Austin.
Austin kind of became your home now.
at some point you moved into that,I'll call it the consulting role.
That's the Accenture.
It probably, was it Accenturewhen you started that?
(20:00):
'cause
Now it, I joined Arthur.
It was Arthur Anderson, whichbecame Anderson Consulting,
which became Accenture.
When I started there were 40,000consultants worldwide in Arthur Anderson.
Accenture now has 700,000 people
Wow.
just on.
point when I came outta GeorgiaTech, there was the big seven firms,
(20:23):
Mm-hmm.
I'm pretty sure there's beensome slicing and dicing.
And are there three now?
Four,
I think four
yeah.
So, Accenture, big, big operation.
started out there.
I don't want to dwell a lot on this.
I want to get to some of these fearsof influence that we're, we're gonna
Hmm.
But what I really love to dois gather some pros and cons.
(20:45):
Things you really gathered fromthose years in that experience,
and maybe some things you leftbehind and didn't take with you.
So tell me a little bit aboutthose Accenture years and
some of the things you got.
the good thing about being inthat consulting role is you see,
I think you get a glimpse ata lot of different scenarios,
A lot of different scenariosand a lot of similar scenarios.
(21:06):
So my practice area was primarily,government and higher education,
and my clients were University ofIllinois, Ohio State, Michigan,
Columbia, Vanderbilt, Cal State.
Texas a and m. So the big Publix, bigprivates, and some, most of those were
(21:30):
one or two year transformational projects.
So my years at Ohio State really preparedme for being at the University of Texas
in Austin as a CIO 'cause I was actually,they hired me to be the Ohio State
leader of the Transformation Project.
(21:51):
So I was, I was actually theclient, which was really great.
'cause then I could tell the Accenturepartner, I want Christie here on Monday.
And she'd go, oh, I, I can't do that.
I see the same report.
You see, I want Christie here on Monday.
and was able to assemble a dream team.
(22:14):
But I learned, you know, especiallyat the University of what it's like
on the customer side of the desk.
And, you know, I dealt with some vendorswho, some were very transactional.
They didn't care about us.
the one vendor showed up once ayear to get their check, which was
(22:34):
always 10% more than the prior year.
And these software we're using was thelearning management system, which is
what 54,000 students use, 4,000 faculty.
It affects everybody.
Well, they thought we were toobig and it cost too much to
transition to another solution.
(22:55):
Well, the trouble was thestudents hated the software.
It was a 1990s, look and feel.
And technically they were the customer.
Right?
I mean, this is something I think gets
that's right.
those environments is are peoplecoming for education and it,
seems like, I remember when I wasat Georgia Tech, I didn't really
feel like a customer very often,
(23:17):
Yeah, well,
but I was the customer sort of right.
yeah, absolutely.
when I got to the university,I met with this professor
who'd been there for 40 years.
he was an electrical engineer,kind of a crusty fellow.
I'd worked with them 15 yearsprior in a statewide network
project that was successful.
And I said, okay, gimme some advice.
(23:37):
He goes, get out of the officeand tell people you give a damn.
And that was the best advice becauseI then would meet with my peers across
the university every four to six weeksand just check in always with an agenda.
And, um, my peers who were my peers,the vice president for public safety.
(24:00):
Well, it wasn't if something would gowrong, it's when it would go wrong.
And how do we work together tomake sure we keep people safe?
the provost for curriculum, it'sher and her office that helped
me select the new solution.
So when we took the solution tothe president, he said, well, what
(24:21):
did the students and faculty think?
Well, they selected it, theyunanimously endorsed this
decision and he said, let's do it.
Each of these projects tooktwo years to implement.
'cause we're so big, it's likean aircraft carrier, you gotta
turn it miles from the, port.
And, we changed all the phones,21,000 phones to voiceover ip.
(24:43):
We, changed out email systems.
We had custom built emailsystem that was 18 years old.
We replaced it with UT branded Gmail,
Faculty and staff, box for file sharing.
So over eight years we've movedas much as we could to the
cloud, including HR payroll.
So in March, 2020, my successorincreased the VPN increase, the zoom,
(25:09):
and 70,000 people went online to doteaching, learning, research and work
that
feel good about that.
That timeframe seems significant,
Yep.
But if I had stayed in my office, Iwouldn't have known she was in pain
trying to change this intractable systemand then got her support and her team
(25:34):
support to implement over two years.
And at the end of the twoyears, this email came.
Across it was to the presidentand she and I were copied on it.
It's like, oh, I'm gonna get fired.
And it was the mostheartfelt warming email.
It was from all the departmentleads complimenting her team and
(25:58):
mine that we helped them overtwo years make the transition.
And because it was such a betterproduct, it was a natural pull.
But they said something like,you know, this sounds like an
arcane IT project, but it wasn't.
This is the lifeblood ofthe university and they.
Thanked us for not only beinghelpful, but working with the vendor
(26:22):
to change things to make it better.
the vendor ended up selling to allthe research one universities like
us, so they knew, it was important.
The senior vice president forsales would call me once a month
just to see how things were going.
My other vendor, when we finallyfired them, never even saw it coming.
(26:44):
They were so clueless and we had a bigcelebration, invited the department
leads and my staff and her staff.
We have a bowling alley on campus, so wehad bowling and pizza and actually had
a cake with a tombstone shape that hadthe rest in peace for the old product.
(27:08):
that's a good tale of two cities there.
It's the best of times andthen kind of the worst of times
That's right.
Coming head to head.
you mentioned something at Accentureyou work with, higher education,
but you also worked with government.
what are some things that you could share?
There might be things you can't, but whatare some things that you could share about
the type work you did with government?
Because I've got a, there's, there'ssomething that's been nagging
(27:32):
at me about government, thingsthat I'm gonna follow up with.
But tell me a
Mm-hmm.
about what you did withgovernment, entities.
probably what I enjoyed the most washelping them with strategic planning.
It's kind of a dirty little secretthat people don't have a strategic
plan, and so often they would reachout and ask for our help to plan.
(27:55):
I had one, Agency, it wasa retirement agency and the
executive director was retiring.
He wanted to leave it in good handsto the next executive director.
So we reviewed all, the agency,came up with recommendations and
then a plan for how to move forward.
And I thought, yeah, that'sreally good stewardship.
we had one university system,15 campuses, 250,000 students.
(28:21):
We went to all the campusesand created an IT strategy.
And the number onepriority was, the network.
The network in Texas, in West Texas.
They were swinging lanternsto get the network to work.
And the second priority wasthey wanted library materials.
Available through thenetwork, a digital library.
(28:45):
This is in the nineties.
And third was distance education.
to the credit of the board.
They funded the network and thenthey funded the digital library.
So 15 years later, I met theUniversity of Texas at Austin.
one of the things the faculty lovewas the digital library that we
had implemented 15 years prior.
(29:07):
Yeah, that's cool that, I guessthe reason I was going there, but
it doesn't sound like you did alot of work at the federal level.
you
Oh, no.
Tapered off, but part of thisyear, we're recording this in
May, late May, I guess, of 20, 25.
People are probably gonna be able tolisten to it in June or something.
this whole doge government efficiencything is going on and, I'm a strategic
(29:32):
guy also, and, as an industrial andsystems engineer, I love talking about
efficiency, effectiveness and all that.
Mm-hmm.
sort of enjoying what's going on, but Ihaven't gotten enough information on it.
And I was just wondering, youreally think that government
can be effective and efficient?
Sounds like you've done that atsome of the state and local levels.
Do you think we
(29:53):
Mm-hmm.
federal level?
Well, actually worked for thefederal government for five years.
I came to Austin, I needed a job, and so Istarted work at the IRS as a tax examiner.
Oh boy.
And yeah, we had production quotas.
We had, you know, if you didn'tmeet your quota, you got fired.
So, this was early eighties andthen I became the payroll officer.
(30:18):
And when I became the payrollofficer, we were automating from
punch cards to online data entry.
And this is really how I gotinto it in the first place.
I was the user, I was the customer.
And I said to the programmer,I want the screens to default
two weeks with all eights.
So if someone's perfect attendance,they just hit enter instead of typing
(30:42):
8, 8, 8, 8, 6,000 times, twice a month.
And we had 6,000 employeesand the guy had a short sleeve
white shirt, skinny black tie.
A big, thick black glasses andyes, a plastic pencil protector.
And he said, no, I can't do it.
(31:06):
So he scurried off and he scurry backthe next week and go, okay, I can do it.
So he is taught to say no toanything I asked for, and then asked
the boss if the boss cleared it,then he could come back and do it.
And that's actually why I, I neededto get some technical skills.
So I didn't have a guy like that holdme hostage for the rest of my career.
(31:28):
And that's what attracted meto Arthur Anderson, which had
a three year training program.
That's interesting.
So that was a good experienceworking in the federal
Yeah, well they were goodbecause it was a union shop and.
It was an eight hour day and that was it.
And I was going to grad schoolthree years part-time, working
(31:49):
full-time grad school part-time.
They would allow me to use my vacation totake classes at Tuesday at 2:00 PM and I
was at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
Wilbur Cohen was the HEW secretary.
Ray Marshall was a laborsecretary Barbara Jordan was a
congresswoman who was on faculty.
(32:09):
Well, I could go to their classes eventhough they were in the middle of the day.
So they were, helpful in gettingme where I needed to get to.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, I'm intrigued bywhat might be going on.
'cause we know government can keepgetting bigger and bigger and so I'm
hopeful that maybe we'll see efficiencies.
(32:30):
Maybe they need morepeople like, you in there.
I'm not sure about Elon Musk.
He's slicing and dicing and all, but
Well,
not
know, there's,
But sometimes you
yeah,
Right.
I've never been a fan of fireready, aim, you have to plan it out,
Yeah, I think
I'm confident, you know, I've seenwhere that retirement agency, we had a
(32:50):
recommendation of how they could managetheir cash better and it came from
the woman in charge of cash managementand I gave her all the credit, but
they basically paid our fees withimplementing that one recommendation.
right.
Well, very good.
I wanna go over to, the thing that wasinteresting to me about the book as
(33:13):
an author myself, I'm always intriguedby titles, but subtitles seem to mean
more to me, and I'm sure when you'reworking with your publisher, y'all
are having these conversations about,gotta grab people with the title.
to me, subtitles, tell me moreabout what the book is really about.
So your subtitle is to Create andNurture Authentic Business Relationships.
(33:35):
And what's interestingis up at the top there
Mm-hmm.
to me that's more the title, but wehave to come up with these catchy
flashy titles and stuff like that.
I'm gonna pick apart some ofthese words and I want you to tell
Sure.
a little bit more about 'em.
I want to designate, first of all wedefine an authentic, that's a word
(33:55):
Hmm.
throw around a good bit in ourculture today, How do you define that?
It's a relationship where it's mutuallybeneficial and you're helping each other.
And it's something that lastsover years and sometimes decades.
So a good example is Ihad a really good client.
(34:17):
I worked on three or four successfulprojects with 15 years later, she calls me
out of the blue and it we're talking, it'slike we hadn't stopped working together.
You know, it's, that's your litmus test.
And she goes, you remember my son Bryce?
I said, yeah, I met himwhen he was five years old.
Well, he's an attorney now and he wantsto apply for a job at the university.
(34:42):
Would you talk with him?
And it's like, of course I will.
You know, not a problem.
I talked to him and I said, okay, Bryce.
All the lawyers in higher ed talk toeach other, find that organization
and you'll know all the issues.
So when I had a contract withGoogle, I got the contract for
University of California at Berkeley.
I didn't start from scratch.
(35:03):
You know, my lawyers reachedout to them and So it is just
being mutually beneficial.
one thing I've observed that a littlebit in that, and I also oversee some
sales organizations and people that areconstantly churning through relationships.
Yeah.
a,
very costly.
(35:24):
Yeah.
every day you wake up,it's a brand new day.
I gotta go out and earnnew business today,
Right.
to as someone almost 70.
I'm guessing you've had the cumulativeeffect in authentic relationships in your
Mm-hmm.
So Accenture has about an80% client retention rate.
(35:47):
People love to be successful,so they reach out.
If you're successful with aclient, they're gonna come
back and ask you to help again.
There are metrics about, you know, ifyou have an 80% retention versus 50%.
I mean, you can put numbers to that.
there was a sales teamthat had a 50% churn rate.
(36:08):
I met with their managerand his salespeople didn't
know any of the customers.
And they didn't know why it wasimportant to know any of their customers.
And so we kicked them in the rear endand said, get out and talk to people.
So I think, um, you know, success,breed success and people, you
(36:31):
know, if you have a trustingrelationship, then that will continue.
Well, the trusting relationship,but also it goes back to that
one of those third principles.
You actually care about the success
Yeah.
And I've even maybe making it even moresuccinct, you just care about others
versus you look at, I joke about it attimes, has a dollar sign on their forehead
(36:54):
Mm-hmm.
that's where some people go through achurn because everything is transactional.
Yeah.
do think maybe like a foundationof what you're talking about is
that heart level truly caring
Mm-hmm.
other people.
People can sense that.
I mean, that's where you get authenticity.
(37:15):
You know, if you show up and you'retrying to sell to an organization you
haven't bothered to read their lookat their website and understand what
their mission is and their values andtheir vision, you're wasting my time.
I would've vendors come to me and theydidn't bother looking at my website.
It's like, well, you'd know ourstrategic priorities for the last
(37:36):
eight years are on my website.
you didn't even bother lookingat it, so you're wasting my time.
we're really describing, maybe 80 or90% everyone who reaches out to me on
LinkedIn, because I've got some thingsin my bio that are very attractive
to, I guess, people that wanna connectwith you and then immediately try
(38:01):
to sell you something in my inbox.
Yeah.
going, you could tell it'sauto, and I'm going, that's
not the type person I want to
No.
And you brought up something earlier, yousaid people, the reason that a, you know,
there's such an, high retention rate,I guess, at Accenture is that they help
people be successful, but I also think.
(38:22):
People want to be successful, butthey don't wanna be around jerks.
I mean,
Yep.
we're achieving some degree of businesssuccess, I still wanna feel good
when I go home at the end of the day.
Right.
right.
One of my best clients was a largeresearch university in the Midwest,
and they were great leaders.
(38:44):
The CFO, provost and Presidentwere from the beginning.
You know, it's hard to change everyone'spayroll and accounting, and it
sounds boring, but affects everybody.
But they w from the beginning,were so supportive and they
would say to the campus, they'regonna be problems in the future.
(39:04):
We're gonna get through 'em.
Just hang with us.
it's not a failure, it'sjust these things are hard.
And when I first interviewed withthem, I was having lunch with the
provost and the CFO and I said.
You know, you have all the,
things you need to be successful.
(39:26):
I'd love to come help you.
help, this was in October, Isaid, but next June I have a
vacation plan to Australia.
And I was supposed to go last year, butI had to cancel it because of business.
So my wife and I have alreadybought the plane tickets.
We had the passports for us and the boys.
(39:47):
I need to go for three weeks, you know,and they said, oh, sure, that's fine.
And so started working with them and inMarch we hit our first big milestone.
We're meeting with the president.
CFO and Provost, and we'regiving him an update.
And Mr. President, I wanna remindyou, as I did the last three months,
that in June I'm gonna be going toAustralia on vacation, his hands
(40:11):
started shaking just like I'm slow,motioning canceling my vacation.
Whoa.
And the CFO goes, and ProvostBo said, wait, Brad, hold on.
Mr. President, when Brad joined us inOctober, he talked about this vacation.
It's important to him and his family.
(40:33):
We should uphold our commitment.
Diane's gonna be in charge.
He's confident, she'll be fine.
we should let him go.
And so my client defended myvacation, which was awesome.
And 10 years later, my wife and I areback in the city, that city, and we had.
Dinner with the CFO and then hisspouse we talked about that situation.
(40:57):
He goes, Brad, when you weregone, we were scared to death,
but that's the quality people.
even though they're scared to death, theytrusted me and upheld their commitment.
that mutual accountability ispart of an authentic relationship.
Right.
And the other, the other two wordsthat I just wanted to ask you
(41:17):
about is, uh, well, you, the titlesaid How to Create and Nurture.
Mm-hmm.
what do you wanna sayabout those two words?
Create and nurture?
Because we joked earlierabout the networking events.
You know, the ones where you put your
Yeah.
on and you grab you a boatload ofbusiness cards that be dating ourselves.
(41:39):
'cause I'm not sure peoplecarry around business cards
I think they do actually.
Some do.
they're digital, youknow, on their phones and
Yeah.
you know, and they go out to these eventswhere they spear people and all of that.
but whatever you wannasay here about creating.
And nurturing those relationships.
Well, let's start with create.
(42:00):
You need to be strategic and intentionalwith the relationships you're trying
to build, so you don't have tobuild relationships with everybody.
yeah, your boss is obvious,your direct reports is obvious.
with customers less obvious.
So you might have, you need to lookat your customer base and prioritize
(42:22):
who are your best customers?
Who do you wanna work with, you know?
And then some customersyou don't wanna work with.
I'm not the believer inthe customer's always.
Right?
same thing with vendors.
I was spending Tens of millionsof dollars a year on network
gear and all sorts of stuff.
(42:42):
Well, I got to know my strategicvendors and ask for a mutually
beneficial relationship.
So the creating part is first bestrategic and intentional of who you're
going to build a relationship with.
And there was a chief financial officerin a large organization, his chief of
(43:05):
staff who's been there 30 years, had thetrust of everyone in the organization.
And she and I helped withthe transformation project.
I went to another similar sizeorganization, talked to the chief of
staff of the CFO, and she literallysaid, I've only been here a year.
I'm not very influential.
(43:25):
I'm working on dinky little projects.
You shouldn't waste your timetalking to me, which was awesome.
So that be intentional ofwho you wanna work with.
And this is something I coach my directreports nurture is getting in front
of people in a consistent manner.
(43:46):
So just put it on your calendar.
I had on my calendar meet withthe VP of public Safety every
month, always in his office.
So I could walk across campusand see people and see his team
and always have an agenda thatyou send out before the meeting.
(44:08):
'cause that's when you canmake sure you're thinking
ahead about, you know what.
Every year I was irritating someonechanging their phone or email,
you know, so you get ahead of itand tell people what's coming.
And then they were good at sharingfeedback with me, how my staff doing,
you know, the vice president forfacilities, we had a terrible relationship
(44:34):
with, because we were bad partners.
And so I, when I got there, I apologizedfor all the bad behavior in the past and
said, I want to be your best partner.
You know, we're buildinga $32 million data center.
I wanna be your best partner on this.
And we work to do that.
But every month I'm in their officetalking about things, and then I
(44:56):
ask my staff, my direct reports tomeet with their peers across campus.
Seven to 10 people every monthor every six weeks, depending on
how closely you work with them.
And this woman who worked forme reminded me of this story.
She read the manuscript, said,you didn't put my story in there.
I said, what story?
when you demanded that I go out andmeet with this manager who hated us.
(45:21):
Oh yeah, I remember that.
and you said you'd rather have us inthe tent than outside the tent So she
went out and met with this person.
They hated us 'cause her pasttransgressions, not being truthful, not
doing what we said we were gonna do.
So we apologized for all thepast transgressions and said
we really want to get better.
(45:42):
And as we got more customeroriented, more proactive, that
person could see us improve.
Over months, and after about eight or ninemonths, she became an advocate for us.
Well, that wouldn't have happened ifmy direct report was hiding in her
office, hiding behind the screen.
(46:05):
Hmm.
So that's the nurturing part.
It is.
That's good.
Thanks for clarifying those two thatkind of triggered something in me.
When you talk about apologizing,one of the things in the book you
emphasize is, I think the wordhumility is a leadership trait.
I think it's something that maybewe all as leaders have to work on.
Mm-hmm.
root of humility, I thinkis that caring for others
(46:28):
Yeah.
others.
But can a leader remain humble withoutcompromising, the confidence that
they need to share or even clarityof vision and maybe even decisiveness
that we talked about earlier.
what are some ways that that leadercan remain humble, especially as
they're elevated in organizations?
(46:51):
Well, there are kind oftwo types of leaders.
There's the imperious leader who youneed to come to them and supplicate, and
they are the smartest people in the room,in their view, very one way direction.
They don't care about you.
I was always trying to be the humblepractitioner who is a team player.
(47:17):
I wanna be the coach.
I want a coach of the team, so thatthe team's successful, I'm successful.
And so I think just leaning on theexpertise of your staff, leaning on the
expertise of people at the university.
there are a lot of reallysmart people there.
(47:37):
So when we were trying to pick softwareto encrypt laptops, I had the IT
directors help me pick the software
and you know, it's bringing thebest minds to bear on these topics.
Not, me, being in the ivorytower just announcing things.
(47:58):
I found it.
This is kind of what helps, this is kindof what I heard you say, and I think it
relates to my It's kind of admitting thatyou don't know everything and that you
Right.
people.
That's right.
and I think in our world sometimeswe see leadership examples that
maybe don't portray that, andwe think that might be success
(48:20):
Yeah.
up to, our political offices,especially at the higher ups at times.
I like that humility.
my theory is that if you do not liveout humility, it'll be forced upon you,
Mm-hmm.
you know?
Well, and you mentioned,you mentioned apologizing.
We have a quarter million deviceshooked to the network every day.
(48:43):
What could possibly go wrong?
Something will go wrong, so my approachwas it's not if something will go wrong.
But what do we do when it goes wrong?
And how do we keep itfrom happening again?
And we became much more transparenton, sorry about that outage.
Here's what happened.
This will keep it from happening again.
(49:05):
Please forgive us.
And some people hang onto these thingsFor years, I had someone who was mad
about a transgression 15 years prior,and I literally just went to him
and said, I'm sorry that happened.
It was inappropriate.
Can you please let it go?
(49:26):
So you just have to beopen and honest about it.
Yeah, I think all of that's good.
Brad, one of the things in the bookyou did is you kinda laid out, I
believe it was 10, I'm actually goingback here to the comments wasn't
there 10 areas that you addressed?
Was that correct?
(49:48):
For,
the sphere?
Well, you've got part one, theinternal sphere of influence.
right,
and then
which is your boss, direct reports,executive leaders and staff.
And then external is, customers,peers, and influencers and,
strategic vendor partners.
Right.
Exactly.
in looking back, this is kind ofthe, this is the trick question
(50:10):
to authors that put a lot of theirtime, energy, and effort into a book.
If there's anything that youwould want to add to it now,
looking back, what might that be?
Anything you would be like, you knowwhat, this is maybe something I've
observed or learned since, or it's therest of the story or anything like that.
(50:30):
And I know that's a tough questionfor an author to say, this is
something that else, maybe it'syour next book, I don't know.
Oh, I think I'm one and done.
you're, you're like a one in a, you'relike, these guys that play college
ball for one season and they're
That's right.
anything,
you know,
back on it.
I was really pleased with my editor.
(50:50):
It took me five years.
So we started before the pandemic andthen pandemic hit and she had a young son.
It's like, look, I'llcall you in a year or two.
but I thought about it every day becauseI had the full outline, I had a direction.
(51:11):
And then what the publisher did,which I'm sure you had the same
experience, is it went through atleast three substantial edits and each
editor had a different angle to it.
I had one say, well, Brad, I'm sure youfeel better after writing that story,
but I don't think it adds to the book.
(51:31):
Why don't you take that one out?
And he was right.
You know, it was like, itwas kind of a. Inappropriate,
but I felt better writing it.
but I think that allowed me to, and Iwas able to share the manuscript with
a lot of people who worked with me atAccenture and the university, and they all
(51:54):
brought up different angles and things.
So, nothing pops intomy head at the moment.
Who would you say the book is for?
define the audience That you really,either you are writing it to them.
'cause sometimes when we're writing we'vegot someone or some type person in mind or
what you've observed as it's been releasedare gaining a lot of benefit from it.
(52:17):
Yeah.
I decided for people who wantto, Be in the C-suite someday.
they're managers.
I got a lot of feedbackfrom middle managers because
no one ever talks to them.
managing up and down I had a lotof positive feedback from middle
managers and people in the C-suite.
They said, geez, I wish Ihad read this 30 years ago.
(52:40):
I could have used some of these ideas.
on Amazon.
It's a bestseller in three categories,leadership, training, mentoring and
coaching and customer relations.
those were my target areas.
So I feel good about that.
Well, tell us where people can find,and I know Amazon, obviously that's a
(53:00):
place they can go get the book, but Ibelieve you got a place people can connect
with you and maybe read a sample of it.
So give us all that info now.
And I got one more quickquestion before we wrap up.
I'm gonna send you our.
Customized link to my websitethat's tied to your web, podcast.
It will send your listeners to, freesample the book, how to buy the book,
(53:23):
and how to schedule time on my calendar.
Very good.
And is that your, is thatyour personal website?
Go
Yeah, it's www brad engle.com.
Perfect.
And I think you said maybeyou'll do a slash seat.
Go create,
Yes.
that might be listening and don'thave the visual and the links that
we'll include, we'll do that and makesure, I'd love for people to connect
(53:45):
and get the book or connect with you.
I know that there'll be peoplethat'll really resonate with
your style and personality.
Brad, just, you got one morequick tip that maybe we didn't
cover that might help people?
There's the book against Fears ofInfluence that just might help 'em.
Just before we wrap up and Ifinish this up here, just something
Yeah, it, it, uh, back to my professor.
(54:07):
Get out from behind your screen.
Get outta your office andgo Tell people you care.
That is a great tip.
Brad Englert, thank you.
Thank you for writing this book.
Thank you for taking your extensivecareer that spanned from Chicago to
Australia to all over and writingthis book, spheres of Influence.
I'm holding it up for thosethat might be on, YouTube.
(54:29):
It might be a little fuzzy there.
And again, I love the subtitle,how to Create and Nurture
Authentic Business Relationships.
We'll have a link down below or you couldjump on Amazon and, I appreciate you Brad.
Great.
listening in.
This is Seat Go Create.
We've got new episodes everyMonday I am so thankful for all
the comments and everything thatwe keep seeing over on YouTube.
(54:51):
YouTube's really growing right now
Hmm.
I appreciate that.
Love what's going on withall the podcast channels.
thank you for all of that and just keeplistening and sharing and we will see
everyone next week on Seek Go Create.
if you show up and you're trying tosell to an organization you haven't
bothered to read their look at theirwebsite and understand what their
mission is and their values andtheir vision, you're wasting my time.
I would've vendors come to me and theydidn't bother looking at my website.
It's like, well, you'd know ourstrategic priorities for the last
(00:20):
eight years are on my website.
you didn't even bother lookingat it, you're wasting time.
What if Navigating Change didn'thave to feel like chaos, but
(00:41):
could actually be a calling?
This week on Seek, go createthe leadership journey.
I'm joined by Brad Engler,author, advisor, and former Chief
Information Officer at the Universityof Texas at Austin Big School.
With decades of leadership experience atboth Accenture and in higher education,
Brad shares hard-earned wisdom onleading large scale transformation,
(01:04):
aligning it with mission and how Faithquietly informed his professional path.
His new books, fears of Influenceis a blueprint for anyone called
to lead with clarity and purposeand complex environments.
If you're a leader facing change,uncertainty, or high stakes decision
making, conversation is for you.
(01:26):
Brad, welcome to Seat Go Create.
Thanks for inviting me.
Great to have you here, man.
You got so many exciting things onyour resume and within your book,
but let's get started here and, whydon't you pick, would you rather
answer do you do who are you?
Well, I am going to gowith the Who are You?
(01:49):
Because it's really different than,the last 40 years of my career.
And, I retired from Accenture.
most partners retired50, so I was ready to go.
And then two years later, the universitycalled me and they wanted some help with
an IT strategy and hour week pro bono.
So they didn't even pay meuntil three months later.
(02:11):
And then I was halftime sixmonths later, full-time, and
I was there for seven years.
IT Chief Information Officer.
But now, after I retired the secondtime, I really wanted to help
people, grow in their careers.
I enjoyed that.
Through my 40 years.
It was part of the culture atAccenture was to grow your people.
(02:32):
And I actually look back at 22 yearsof annual reviews and I looked at how
my partners helped me become a partner.
And yeah, they did a reallygood job giving me stretch
roles and things like that.
So I had all these stories and Ithought, and I'm still mentoring two or
(02:52):
three people a year, but you know, thatdoesn't scale and I can't clone myself.
And so I thought, well,I'll just write a book.
And so I got together with mypublisher and the editor was terrific.
She says, just inventory all your stories.
And I came up with like 40 to 50 storiesand then we just sent it a whiteboard
(03:16):
and looked at how can we organizethese They fell into relationships,
business relationships, and therewas boss, direct reports, executive
leaders, all your staff, and thoseare your relationship closest to you.
And then there was customers, peers, andinfluencers and strategic vendor partners.
(03:39):
And the stories just fellinto those categories.
And, she was really good.
She says, don't write one pageuntil you have the full outline.
Well, you don't build ahouse without a blueprint.
You don't, write aprogram without a design.
Yeah.
and I, since the book has come out,I've created a couple of workshops.
just did one this week,a one hour workshop.
(04:00):
And there are a lot of young peoplethere who are early in their career,
and I just wanted to help them.
Learn the secret of the importanceof investing in relationships.
And, you know, people talk aboutnetworking all the time and you know, to
me it's superficial and transactional.
in 40 years I've never been toa networking event where I got a
(04:23):
customer out of it, and I had onefellow, I had his business card.
a week later he is calling to askme to donate to his not-for-profit.
So I don't even know who you are.
That would be a no.
a lot of people who are my vintageare giving it to their adult
children so they can, 'cause theydon't teach this in business school.
(04:44):
and so I've just, reallyenjoyed, helping people grow.
is this kind of a mission for younow at this stage of your life?
Yeah.
it really is.
I've been successful.
I've been fortunate, very fortunateto have really good mentors over the
years, and it's a way to pay it forward.
Hmm.
That's good.
so what's interesting is thatsometimes relationship people
(05:08):
aren't considered technical.
And technical people aren't considered
Mm. Mm-hmm.
tell me, it seems as if I'm sittinghere talking to a guy that CIO,
technical background, whatever.
And we're gonna go over a littlebit of background in just a moment.
'cause I got some questionsfrom kind of way back.
But I mean, are you a relationshipguy or a technical guy or both?
(05:33):
Or where do you lean?
Well, probably lean moreon the relationship side.
I had to learn enough of thetechnology so I could translate
to my customers or my executives.
I did a lot of, translationat the university.
they're brilliant PhDs, whoare deans and presidents and,
(05:55):
but they don't know technology.
And so I try to use simple wordsto convey, some complex, terms.
But I had to learn how to program.
I had to learn how to design programs.
I had to learn how to manageprogrammers and designers.
And the technology changes over the years,but the principles are really the same.
for those that might be listeningin, y'all heard him say 40 years
(06:17):
in, business, and the audienceknows I'm in my early sixties.
I'm guessing you're in your sixties.
is that accurate?
I will be, 70 in June.
Congratulations.
So that's coming up.
That actually might be right aroundthe time this releases, so it we'll
Excellent.
a birthday celebration for you.
(06:38):
Excellent.
so one of the things that, I had aconversation recently with some clients
that I'm working with, and we were talkingabout some generational differences
that we're noticing in the workplace.
Mm-hmm.
and some of it is related tocommunications styles and some
of it is related to work ethic.
(06:58):
Some of it was related to making, bothof us, or we were quick decision makers
and we were noticing some passivity andyounger generations we were dealing with.
You mentioned that you've gotpeople you interact with that are
giving book to their adult children.
Mm-hmm.
Talk about just some generational stuff.
(07:19):
Some of these things, I mean, I'm readingthrough and I'm going Yeah, that's right.
But some of this stuffcould be new for people.
They've never heard it.
So just let's start havingconversations around the generational
differences in some of these items.
Well, certainly at the university Ihad 330 people in my organization and
(07:39):
all the way from student workers to,people who were ready to retire and
been at the university for 40 years.
So I had to deal with all levels,and I found that there really.
Three principles that I tried tofollow in all those relationships,
(08:00):
including my students, which wasunderstand their goals and aspirations.
what's your major?
What do you wanna do?
And, what kind of work do you want to do?
I would have interns working for mewho I would help them get an internship
somewhere aligned with their work.
Second is setting andmanaging expectations.
(08:21):
I was bad at it early in my career.
I got much better atit later in my career.
But, two phrases came up in the book.
One is, if you're a manager,people are not mind readers,
so you need to use your words.
And then the other phrase is, if you're adirect report and you need something from
the manager, you need to use your words.
(08:41):
And so I tried to be veryclear on when I asked someone
to do something that I would.
Discuss, you know, whendoes it need to be done?
You know, what's reasonable,what does it look like?
And not just quickly, say, oh, godo this and have them flounder.
And then the third principle isgenuinely caring about their success.
(09:03):
I would spend time walking the halls, Icall it management, by stumbling around.
And, I would talk to people, I wouldwalk through the help desk area where
all the students are, you can be verypopular when you bring a bunch of
donuts to the, help desk area or pizza.
they're always starving.
just to get to know, whatare people trying to achieve?
(09:25):
I had someone who, a direct report,I said, do you wanna be a CIO someday
or you wanna be a technical person?
they said, well, I reallyenjoy the technical work.
I said, well, great, we need you.
And then another, womanwanted to be a CIO.
I said, well, when I go onvacation, I'm gonna put you in
charge and see how you like it.
(09:46):
So, just taking the time to ask people,what are they trying to achieve?
Who doesn't want to share that?
And then being good about ifyou can help 'em, help 'em.
And if not, sometimes youknow someone who can help 'em.
So, you don't have to.
Help everybody.
(10:07):
I think in the book you saidsomething to the effect, I may be
getting this wrong, but you somethingthat communication is a duty.
Mm-hmm.
it's part of our duty to do that.
I'm not sure that everyone looks atthat, and that could be something
that might be slightly generational,even though I notice that in a lot of
arenas, people aren't really proactivewhen it comes to communication.
(10:28):
How has your approach to communicationchanged over your career and maybe even,
especially during challenging seasons?
I actually think that challenging seasonsis when we learn what we're made of.
Hmm.
how, just give maybe a, you mentionedthat you were better at it later, so a few
Yeah,
let's go ahead and
(10:49):
I,
maybe when you weren't so good,because I think that helps the listener
because they're probably sitting heregoing, man, I'm not where Brad is.
yeah.
some of the challengesyou've dealt with there?
Well, saying yes to everything,
you know?
Yeah, I, I, I was really bad about,canceling vacations and, working too
(11:10):
much and, you know, I loved what I did.
So part of it was self perpetuating, butI, when I was, a manager, I found a book
called Managing Expectations that waswritten by a psychologist who applied her
psychological insights to it world, andit could be at any organization really.
(11:33):
And one of her techniques was justsay, whoa, not say no, just say whoa.
And literally the next day, mytype A personality boss, she
calls me up at five o'clock.
I'm trying to leave to havedinner with my wife and.
and she, I need a white paper.
(11:56):
A white paper.
And, you know, it justsounded really urgent.
And I was scared, but I said, whoa.
And I said, when do youneed this white paper?
Oh, let me check my calendar.
I need it in two weeks.
Okay, how many pages do youwant this white paper to be?
(12:16):
three.
I was thinking 10.
do you have an example of a white paper?
Oh, yeah.
Ask David.
I did one for XYZ Corp 10 years ago.
Well, guess what?
I went home and had dinner with my wife.
Now before I learned to say, whoa,I would've called her canceled
dinner, upsetting her and me.
I would have stayed up all night,written a 10 page white paper, and
(12:42):
delivered it the next day and getyelled at, this is not what I want.
And it's like, lose, lose, lose.
And.
Just by being clear and taking,creating some mental space and
time to really understand you.
You say you're a quick decision maker.
(13:03):
I actually, people like my managementstyle 'cause I'm more of a plotter.
And so they'd come in with these,problems and they wanted to rush to
the solution and I said, well, ittook us 40 years to get this way.
Let's understand what the problem is.
one of my techniques wasintentional foot dragging where
I didn't rush to the decision.
(13:25):
and I would drag my feet.
I had a boss who.
Didn't want me to buybottled water for my staff.
Now we were in buildings that werebuilt in 1930s and forties, lead pipes.
I had one building where therewas sediment in the glass
when, my staff would do it.
So I wanted to buy their water.
(13:47):
it was not that expensive.
but he was a CFO andthey're penny pinchers.
a peer of mine wouldn'tbuy water for his staff.
they wanted to drag me down tothe lowest common denominator.
even cut the water in myoffice and the coffee.
So I brought my own water and coffeefor seven years, but I basically
ignored the boss for years.
(14:11):
then the new boss shows up, hegoes, what's his water thing?
And he stopped it.
I dragged my feet for seven years.
I wonder if actually when youmentioned that you're a professional
foot dragger, I almost saw thatyou might need to trademark that.
That actually could be a good,leadership or management approach
and, it is real interesting.
(14:31):
I often will move quickly I haveto force myself to slow down.
Right.
the people, really for my spiritual walk.
Mm-hmm.
I interact with the Lord, andsometimes on prayer time, the Lord
says, would you just slow down
Yeah.
little
Mm-hmm.
I, but before we get too far into here,
Mm-hmm.
to back up 'cause I like tounderstand kind of how people, I
(14:54):
like to understand their journey.
Mm-hmm.
as you're sitting here for those,watching the video, I think over your
left shoulder, you've got some bookson Australia and I read somewhere, I
think this was correct, that you werea high school teacher in Australia.
that's correct.
I was an exchange student in Australia,and I was there when I was, 17 years old.
(15:17):
And then after I graduated undergraduate,I went back to the same school
and taught for a year and a half.
And it was really fun because thestudents knew, I knew what they knew.
So even though I, as a yank,
day ahead of him
they knew where things were happening.
So, I've been back with the familyprobably every five years or so.
(15:38):
one year I was back, I said to myAustralian mom, you know, I'm the
Chief Information Officer at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.
She looked at me and said, Ididn't think you're that smart.
I said, I wasn't when I was17, but I went to college and
then I went to graduate school.
(15:59):
Wow.
so you went over there as an exchangestudent and then later you went back.
what part of Australia were you in?
just north of Sydney, about a hundredmiles is a valley called the Hunter
River Valley, known for their red wines.
this was a rural town called Maitland,which is, a lot of agriculture.
It's all built up now.
(16:19):
I've been to that wine country.
Oh, awesome.
in Australia and NewZealand's reason I'm asking,
Nice.
had some friends and we went up to
I
wine country and I thinkwe spent the night up there
Australia's a beautiful place.
What are some
Mm.
either, either from the culturalexperience or the teaching experience
you learned during that season ofyour life that you've kind of taken
(16:42):
with you for the rest of your life?
Mm-hmm.
you got from that experience?
Well, I think that's where mydesire to help people started.
It's as you're a teacher, you'vegot, I had, ninth grade all boys.
Well, how do you keep themfrom tearing the room apart?
(17:02):
And I was teaching science and thenI had, you know, 11th grade girls
and boys, English and histories.
But the younger guys, Ihad to really engage them.
And, you know, I was teaching scienceand I remember one, guy came up to me at.
Lunch, you know, on the playground.
(17:22):
He goes, what's, what's gonnahappen in science today?
And I said, I'm not gonnatell you you have to wait,
but just, you know, to see people growand, you know, you have, there's a direct
correlation and how hard you work as ateacher to how well your students do.
(17:43):
And I could see that every day.
you mentioned in your principlesearlier you talked about,
genuinely caring for people.
Hmm.
always had that?
Is it something that'sdeveloped over time?
I know you're, I know you'vegot a faith component to your
Hmm.
What, where, where has that come from?
Or has it just been a build orgive, give some background on that.
(18:06):
So where do you think that came from?
Your genuine caring for other people?
my parents,
Hmm.
Tell me more.
you know, they were, really good about,looking out for people, in our church,
taking care of the people who didn'thave what we had and kind of teaching
me early on to be more sensitiveto the fact that, we were lucky.
(18:32):
Not everyone is that lucky,so, be sensitive to that.
Did you grow up, I guessin a church environment and
Yeah,
faith was always afoundation of your life.
yeah, yeah.
United Church of Christ.
And did I see from the Midwest.
I know you've spent, we'll talk aboutyour role at University of Texas soon,
Mm-hmm.
I know you spent a lot of timein and around that Austin area.
(18:52):
You're still there, butI think I saw Midwest.
where are you originally from?
Where'd you grow up?
I grew up, outside of Chicago, asuburb, crystal Lake, Illinois.
it was a small town,probably 10,000 people.
now it's of course all built up.
And then my undergraduate schoolis shyer College, which is in
a, at the time, a small ruralcampus in Mount Carroll, Illinois.
(19:18):
And really, when I got to finish up myteaching in Australia, I knew I wanted
to go to graduate school, literally put amap of the US out on the kitchen table and
said, okay, I don't wanna be cold anymore.
So I'm going somewhere southof the Mason Dixon line.
(19:39):
been to Austin before I've beento Florida, and I thought, well,
Florida's a little too humid forme, so I'll go, I'll go to Austin,
and that's how I ended up here.
So you went to Austin.
Austin kind of became your home now.
at some point you moved into that,I'll call it the consulting role.
That's the Accenture.
It probably, was it Accenturewhen you started that?
(20:00):
'cause
Now it, I joined Arthur.
It was Arthur Anderson, whichbecame Anderson Consulting,
which became Accenture.
When I started there were 40,000consultants worldwide in Arthur Anderson.
Accenture now has 700,000 people
Wow.
just on.
point when I came outta GeorgiaTech, there was the big seven firms,
(20:23):
Mm-hmm.
I'm pretty sure there's beensome slicing and dicing.
And are there three now?
Four,
I think four
yeah.
So, Accenture, big, big operation.
started out there.
I don't want to dwell a lot on this.
I want to get to some of these fearsof influence that we're, we're gonna
Hmm.
But what I really love to dois gather some pros and cons.
(20:45):
Things you really gathered fromthose years in that experience,
and maybe some things you leftbehind and didn't take with you.
So tell me a little bit aboutthose Accenture years and
some of the things you got.
the good thing about being inthat consulting role is you see,
I think you get a glimpse ata lot of different scenarios,
A lot of different scenariosand a lot of similar scenarios.
(21:06):
So my practice area was primarily,government and higher education,
and my clients were University ofIllinois, Ohio State, Michigan,
Columbia, Vanderbilt, Cal State.
Texas a and m. So the big Publix, bigprivates, and some, most of those were
(21:30):
one or two year transformational projects.
So my years at Ohio State really preparedme for being at the University of Texas
in Austin as a CIO 'cause I was actually,they hired me to be the Ohio State
leader of the Transformation Project.
(21:51):
So I was, I was actually theclient, which was really great.
'cause then I could tell the Accenturepartner, I want Christie here on Monday.
And she'd go, oh, I, I can't do that.
I see the same report.
You see, I want Christie here on Monday.
and was able to assemble a dream team.
(22:14):
But I learned, you know, especiallyat the University of what it's like
on the customer side of the desk.
And, you know, I dealt with some vendorswho, some were very transactional.
They didn't care about us.
the one vendor showed up once ayear to get their check, which was
(22:34):
always 10% more than the prior year.
And these software we're using was thelearning management system, which is
what 54,000 students use, 4,000 faculty.
It affects everybody.
Well, they thought we were toobig and it cost too much to
transition to another solution.
(22:55):
Well, the trouble was thestudents hated the software.
It was a 1990s, look and feel.
And technically they were the customer.
Right?
I mean, this is something I think gets
that's right.
those environments is are peoplecoming for education and it,
seems like, I remember when I wasat Georgia Tech, I didn't really
feel like a customer very often,
(23:17):
Yeah, well,
but I was the customer sort of right.
yeah, absolutely.
when I got to the university,I met with this professor
who'd been there for 40 years.
he was an electrical engineer,kind of a crusty fellow.
I'd worked with them 15 yearsprior in a statewide network
project that was successful.
And I said, okay, gimme some advice.
(23:37):
He goes, get out of the officeand tell people you give a damn.
And that was the best advice becauseI then would meet with my peers across
the university every four to six weeksand just check in always with an agenda.
And, um, my peers who were my peers,the vice president for public safety.
(24:00):
Well, it wasn't if something would gowrong, it's when it would go wrong.
And how do we work together tomake sure we keep people safe?
the provost for curriculum, it'sher and her office that helped
me select the new solution.
So when we took the solution tothe president, he said, well, what
(24:21):
did the students and faculty think?
Well, they selected it, theyunanimously endorsed this
decision and he said, let's do it.
Each of these projects tooktwo years to implement.
'cause we're so big, it's likean aircraft carrier, you gotta
turn it miles from the, port.
And, we changed all the phones,21,000 phones to voiceover ip.
(24:43):
We, changed out email systems.
We had custom built emailsystem that was 18 years old.
We replaced it with UT branded Gmail,
Faculty and staff, box for file sharing.
So over eight years we've movedas much as we could to the
cloud, including HR payroll.
So in March, 2020, my successorincreased the VPN increase, the zoom,
(25:09):
and 70,000 people went online to doteaching, learning, research and work
that
feel good about that.
That timeframe seems significant,
Yep.
But if I had stayed in my office, Iwouldn't have known she was in pain
trying to change this intractable systemand then got her support and her team
(25:34):
support to implement over two years.
And at the end of the twoyears, this email came.
Across it was to the presidentand she and I were copied on it.
It's like, oh, I'm gonna get fired.
And it was the mostheartfelt warming email.
It was from all the departmentleads complimenting her team and
(25:58):
mine that we helped them overtwo years make the transition.
And because it was such a betterproduct, it was a natural pull.
But they said something like,you know, this sounds like an
arcane IT project, but it wasn't.
This is the lifeblood ofthe university and they.
Thanked us for not only beinghelpful, but working with the vendor
(26:22):
to change things to make it better.
the vendor ended up selling to allthe research one universities like
us, so they knew, it was important.
The senior vice president forsales would call me once a month
just to see how things were going.
My other vendor, when we finallyfired them, never even saw it coming.
(26:44):
They were so clueless and we had a bigcelebration, invited the department
leads and my staff and her staff.
We have a bowling alley on campus, so wehad bowling and pizza and actually had
a cake with a tombstone shape that hadthe rest in peace for the old product.
(27:08):
that's a good tale of two cities there.
It's the best of times andthen kind of the worst of times
That's right.
Coming head to head.
you mentioned something at Accentureyou work with, higher education,
but you also worked with government.
what are some things that you could share?
There might be things you can't, but whatare some things that you could share about
the type work you did with government?
Because I've got a, there's, there'ssomething that's been nagging
(27:32):
at me about government, thingsthat I'm gonna follow up with.
But tell me a
Mm-hmm.
about what you did withgovernment, entities.
probably what I enjoyed the most washelping them with strategic planning.
It's kind of a dirty little secretthat people don't have a strategic
plan, and so often they would reachout and ask for our help to plan.
(27:55):
I had one, Agency, it wasa retirement agency and the
executive director was retiring.
He wanted to leave it in good handsto the next executive director.
So we reviewed all, the agency,came up with recommendations and
then a plan for how to move forward.
And I thought, yeah, that'sreally good stewardship.
we had one university system,15 campuses, 250,000 students.
(28:21):
We went to all the campusesand created an IT strategy.
And the number onepriority was, the network.
The network in Texas, in West Texas.
They were swinging lanternsto get the network to work.
And the second priority wasthey wanted library materials.
Available through thenetwork, a digital library.
(28:45):
This is in the nineties.
And third was distance education.
to the credit of the board.
They funded the network and thenthey funded the digital library.
So 15 years later, I met theUniversity of Texas at Austin.
one of the things the faculty lovewas the digital library that we
had implemented 15 years prior.
(29:07):
Yeah, that's cool that, I guessthe reason I was going there, but
it doesn't sound like you did alot of work at the federal level.
you
Oh, no.
Tapered off, but part of thisyear, we're recording this in
May, late May, I guess, of 20, 25.
People are probably gonna be able tolisten to it in June or something.
this whole doge government efficiencything is going on and, I'm a strategic
(29:32):
guy also, and, as an industrial andsystems engineer, I love talking about
efficiency, effectiveness and all that.
Mm-hmm.
sort of enjoying what's going on, but Ihaven't gotten enough information on it.
And I was just wondering, youreally think that government
can be effective and efficient?
Sounds like you've done that atsome of the state and local levels.
Do you think we
(29:53):
Mm-hmm.
federal level?
Well, actually worked for thefederal government for five years.
I came to Austin, I needed a job, and so Istarted work at the IRS as a tax examiner.
Oh boy.
And yeah, we had production quotas.
We had, you know, if you didn'tmeet your quota, you got fired.
So, this was early eighties andthen I became the payroll officer.
(30:18):
And when I became the payrollofficer, we were automating from
punch cards to online data entry.
And this is really how I gotinto it in the first place.
I was the user, I was the customer.
And I said to the programmer,I want the screens to default
two weeks with all eights.
So if someone's perfect attendance,they just hit enter instead of typing
(30:42):
8, 8, 8, 8, 6,000 times, twice a month.
And we had 6,000 employeesand the guy had a short sleeve
white shirt, skinny black tie.
A big, thick black glasses andyes, a plastic pencil protector.
And he said, no, I can't do it.
(31:06):
So he scurried off and he scurry backthe next week and go, okay, I can do it.
So he is taught to say no toanything I asked for, and then asked
the boss if the boss cleared it,then he could come back and do it.
And that's actually why I, I neededto get some technical skills.
So I didn't have a guy like that holdme hostage for the rest of my career.
(31:28):
And that's what attracted meto Arthur Anderson, which had
a three year training program.
That's interesting.
So that was a good experienceworking in the federal
Yeah, well they were goodbecause it was a union shop and.
It was an eight hour day and that was it.
And I was going to grad schoolthree years part-time, working
(31:49):
full-time grad school part-time.
They would allow me to use my vacation totake classes at Tuesday at 2:00 PM and I
was at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
Wilbur Cohen was the HEW secretary.
Ray Marshall was a laborsecretary Barbara Jordan was a
congresswoman who was on faculty.
(32:09):
Well, I could go to their classes eventhough they were in the middle of the day.
So they were, helpful in gettingme where I needed to get to.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, I'm intrigued bywhat might be going on.
'cause we know government can keepgetting bigger and bigger and so I'm
hopeful that maybe we'll see efficiencies.
(32:30):
Maybe they need morepeople like, you in there.
I'm not sure about Elon Musk.
He's slicing and dicing and all, but
Well,
not
know, there's,
But sometimes you
yeah,
Right.
I've never been a fan of fireready, aim, you have to plan it out,
Yeah, I think
I'm confident, you know, I've seenwhere that retirement agency, we had a
(32:50):
recommendation of how they could managetheir cash better and it came from
the woman in charge of cash managementand I gave her all the credit, but
they basically paid our fees withimplementing that one recommendation.
right.
Well, very good.
I wanna go over to, the thing that wasinteresting to me about the book as
(33:13):
an author myself, I'm always intriguedby titles, but subtitles seem to mean
more to me, and I'm sure when you'reworking with your publisher, y'all
are having these conversations about,gotta grab people with the title.
to me, subtitles, tell me moreabout what the book is really about.
So your subtitle is to Create andNurture Authentic Business Relationships.
(33:35):
And what's interestingis up at the top there
Mm-hmm.
to me that's more the title, but wehave to come up with these catchy
flashy titles and stuff like that.
I'm gonna pick apart some ofthese words and I want you to tell
Sure.
a little bit more about 'em.
I want to designate, first of all wedefine an authentic, that's a word
(33:55):
Hmm.
throw around a good bit in ourculture today, How do you define that?
It's a relationship where it's mutuallybeneficial and you're helping each other.
And it's something that lastsover years and sometimes decades.
So a good example is Ihad a really good client.
(34:17):
I worked on three or four successfulprojects with 15 years later, she calls me
out of the blue and it we're talking, it'slike we hadn't stopped working together.
You know, it's, that's your litmus test.
And she goes, you remember my son Bryce?
I said, yeah, I met himwhen he was five years old.
Well, he's an attorney now and he wantsto apply for a job at the university.
(34:42):
Would you talk with him?
And it's like, of course I will.
You know, not a problem.
I talked to him and I said, okay, Bryce.
All the lawyers in higher ed talk toeach other, find that organization
and you'll know all the issues.
So when I had a contract withGoogle, I got the contract for
University of California at Berkeley.
I didn't start from scratch.
(35:03):
You know, my lawyers reachedout to them and So it is just
being mutually beneficial.
one thing I've observed that a littlebit in that, and I also oversee some
sales organizations and people that areconstantly churning through relationships.
Yeah.
a,
very costly.
(35:24):
Yeah.
every day you wake up,it's a brand new day.
I gotta go out and earnnew business today,
Right.
to as someone almost 70.
I'm guessing you've had the cumulativeeffect in authentic relationships in your
Mm-hmm.
So Accenture has about an80% client retention rate.
(35:47):
People love to be successful,so they reach out.
If you're successful with aclient, they're gonna come
back and ask you to help again.
There are metrics about, you know, ifyou have an 80% retention versus 50%.
I mean, you can put numbers to that.
there was a sales teamthat had a 50% churn rate.
(36:08):
I met with their managerand his salespeople didn't
know any of the customers.
And they didn't know why it wasimportant to know any of their customers.
And so we kicked them in the rear endand said, get out and talk to people.
So I think, um, you know, success,breed success and people, you
(36:31):
know, if you have a trustingrelationship, then that will continue.
Well, the trusting relationship,but also it goes back to that
one of those third principles.
You actually care about the success
Yeah.
And I've even maybe making it even moresuccinct, you just care about others
versus you look at, I joke about it attimes, has a dollar sign on their forehead
(36:54):
Mm-hmm.
that's where some people go through achurn because everything is transactional.
Yeah.
do think maybe like a foundationof what you're talking about is
that heart level truly caring
Mm-hmm.
other people.
People can sense that.
I mean, that's where you get authenticity.
(37:15):
You know, if you show up and you'retrying to sell to an organization you
haven't bothered to read their lookat their website and understand what
their mission is and their values andtheir vision, you're wasting my time.
I would've vendors come to me and theydidn't bother looking at my website.
It's like, well, you'd know ourstrategic priorities for the last
(37:36):
eight years are on my website.
you didn't even bother lookingat it, so you're wasting my time.
we're really describing, maybe 80 or90% everyone who reaches out to me on
LinkedIn, because I've got some thingsin my bio that are very attractive
to, I guess, people that wanna connectwith you and then immediately try
(38:01):
to sell you something in my inbox.
Yeah.
going, you could tell it'sauto, and I'm going, that's
not the type person I want to
No.
And you brought up something earlier, yousaid people, the reason that a, you know,
there's such an, high retention rate,I guess, at Accenture is that they help
people be successful, but I also think.
(38:22):
People want to be successful, butthey don't wanna be around jerks.
I mean,
Yep.
we're achieving some degree of businesssuccess, I still wanna feel good
when I go home at the end of the day.
Right.
right.
One of my best clients was a largeresearch university in the Midwest,
and they were great leaders.
(38:44):
The CFO, provost and Presidentwere from the beginning.
You know, it's hard to change everyone'spayroll and accounting, and it
sounds boring, but affects everybody.
But they w from the beginning,were so supportive and they
would say to the campus, they'regonna be problems in the future.
(39:04):
We're gonna get through 'em.
Just hang with us.
it's not a failure, it'sjust these things are hard.
And when I first interviewed withthem, I was having lunch with the
provost and the CFO and I said.
You know, you have all the,
things you need to be successful.
(39:26):
I'd love to come help you.
help, this was in October, Isaid, but next June I have a
vacation plan to Australia.
And I was supposed to go last year, butI had to cancel it because of business.
So my wife and I have alreadybought the plane tickets.
We had the passports for us and the boys.
(39:47):
I need to go for three weeks, you know,and they said, oh, sure, that's fine.
And so started working with them and inMarch we hit our first big milestone.
We're meeting with the president.
CFO and Provost, and we'regiving him an update.
And Mr. President, I wanna remindyou, as I did the last three months,
that in June I'm gonna be going toAustralia on vacation, his hands
(40:11):
started shaking just like I'm slow,motioning canceling my vacation.
Whoa.
And the CFO goes, and ProvostBo said, wait, Brad, hold on.
Mr. President, when Brad joined us inOctober, he talked about this vacation.
It's important to him and his family.
(40:33):
We should uphold our commitment.
Diane's gonna be in charge.
He's confident, she'll be fine.
we should let him go.
And so my client defended myvacation, which was awesome.
And 10 years later, my wife and I areback in the city, that city, and we had.
Dinner with the CFO and then hisspouse we talked about that situation.
(40:57):
He goes, Brad, when you weregone, we were scared to death,
but that's the quality people.
even though they're scared to death, theytrusted me and upheld their commitment.
that mutual accountability ispart of an authentic relationship.
Right.
And the other, the other two wordsthat I just wanted to ask you
(41:17):
about is, uh, well, you, the titlesaid How to Create and Nurture.
Mm-hmm.
what do you wanna sayabout those two words?
Create and nurture?
Because we joked earlierabout the networking events.
You know, the ones where you put your
Yeah.
on and you grab you a boatload ofbusiness cards that be dating ourselves.
(41:39):
'cause I'm not sure peoplecarry around business cards
I think they do actually.
Some do.
they're digital, youknow, on their phones and
Yeah.
you know, and they go out to these eventswhere they spear people and all of that.
but whatever you wannasay here about creating.
And nurturing those relationships.
Well, let's start with create.
(42:00):
You need to be strategic and intentionalwith the relationships you're trying
to build, so you don't have tobuild relationships with everybody.
yeah, your boss is obvious,your direct reports is obvious.
with customers less obvious.
So you might have, you need to lookat your customer base and prioritize
(42:22):
who are your best customers?
Who do you wanna work with, you know?
And then some customersyou don't wanna work with.
I'm not the believer inthe customer's always.
Right?
same thing with vendors.
I was spending Tens of millionsof dollars a year on network
gear and all sorts of stuff.
(42:42):
Well, I got to know my strategicvendors and ask for a mutually
beneficial relationship.
So the creating part is first bestrategic and intentional of who you're
going to build a relationship with.
And there was a chief financial officerin a large organization, his chief of
(43:05):
staff who's been there 30 years, had thetrust of everyone in the organization.
And she and I helped withthe transformation project.
I went to another similar sizeorganization, talked to the chief of
staff of the CFO, and she literallysaid, I've only been here a year.
I'm not very influential.
(43:25):
I'm working on dinky little projects.
You shouldn't waste your timetalking to me, which was awesome.
So that be intentional ofwho you wanna work with.
And this is something I coach my directreports nurture is getting in front
of people in a consistent manner.
(43:46):
So just put it on your calendar.
I had on my calendar meet withthe VP of public Safety every
month, always in his office.
So I could walk across campusand see people and see his team
and always have an agenda thatyou send out before the meeting.
(44:08):
'cause that's when you canmake sure you're thinking
ahead about, you know what.
Every year I was irritating someonechanging their phone or email,
you know, so you get ahead of itand tell people what's coming.
And then they were good at sharingfeedback with me, how my staff doing,
you know, the vice president forfacilities, we had a terrible relationship
(44:34):
with, because we were bad partners.
And so I, when I got there, I apologizedfor all the bad behavior in the past and
said, I want to be your best partner.
You know, we're buildinga $32 million data center.
I wanna be your best partner on this.
And we work to do that.
But every month I'm in their officetalking about things, and then I
(44:56):
ask my staff, my direct reports tomeet with their peers across campus.
Seven to 10 people every monthor every six weeks, depending on
how closely you work with them.
And this woman who worked forme reminded me of this story.
She read the manuscript, said,you didn't put my story in there.
I said, what story?
when you demanded that I go out andmeet with this manager who hated us.
(45:21):
Oh yeah, I remember that.
and you said you'd rather have us inthe tent than outside the tent So she
went out and met with this person.
They hated us 'cause her pasttransgressions, not being truthful, not
doing what we said we were gonna do.
So we apologized for all thepast transgressions and said
we really want to get better.
(45:42):
And as we got more customeroriented, more proactive, that
person could see us improve.
Over months, and after about eight or ninemonths, she became an advocate for us.
Well, that wouldn't have happened ifmy direct report was hiding in her
office, hiding behind the screen.
(46:05):
Hmm.
So that's the nurturing part.
It is.
That's good.
Thanks for clarifying those two thatkind of triggered something in me.
When you talk about apologizing,one of the things in the book you
emphasize is, I think the wordhumility is a leadership trait.
I think it's something that maybewe all as leaders have to work on.
Mm-hmm.
root of humility, I thinkis that caring for others
(46:28):
Yeah.
others.
But can a leader remain humble withoutcompromising, the confidence that
they need to share or even clarityof vision and maybe even decisiveness
that we talked about earlier.
what are some ways that that leadercan remain humble, especially as
they're elevated in organizations?
(46:51):
Well, there are kind oftwo types of leaders.
There's the imperious leader who youneed to come to them and supplicate, and
they are the smartest people in the room,in their view, very one way direction.
They don't care about you.
I was always trying to be the humblepractitioner who is a team player.
(47:17):
I wanna be the coach.
I want a coach of the team, so thatthe team's successful, I'm successful.
And so I think just leaning on theexpertise of your staff, leaning on the
expertise of people at the university.
there are a lot of reallysmart people there.
(47:37):
So when we were trying to pick softwareto encrypt laptops, I had the IT
directors help me pick the software
and you know, it's bringing thebest minds to bear on these topics.
Not, me, being in the ivorytower just announcing things.
(47:58):
I found it.
This is kind of what helps, this is kindof what I heard you say, and I think it
relates to my It's kind of admitting thatyou don't know everything and that you
Right.
people.
That's right.
and I think in our world sometimeswe see leadership examples that
maybe don't portray that, andwe think that might be success
(48:20):
Yeah.
up to, our political offices,especially at the higher ups at times.
I like that humility.
my theory is that if you do not liveout humility, it'll be forced upon you,
Mm-hmm.
you know?
Well, and you mentioned,you mentioned apologizing.
We have a quarter million deviceshooked to the network every day.
(48:43):
What could possibly go wrong?
Something will go wrong, so my approachwas it's not if something will go wrong.
But what do we do when it goes wrong?
And how do we keep itfrom happening again?
And we became much more transparenton, sorry about that outage.
Here's what happened.
This will keep it from happening again.
(49:05):
Please forgive us.
And some people hang onto these thingsFor years, I had someone who was mad
about a transgression 15 years prior,and I literally just went to him
and said, I'm sorry that happened.
It was inappropriate.
Can you please let it go?
(49:26):
So you just have to beopen and honest about it.
Yeah, I think all of that's good.
Brad, one of the things in the bookyou did is you kinda laid out, I
believe it was 10, I'm actually goingback here to the comments wasn't
there 10 areas that you addressed?
Was that correct?
(49:48):
For,
the sphere?
Well, you've got part one, theinternal sphere of influence.
right,
and then
which is your boss, direct reports,executive leaders and staff.
And then external is, customers,peers, and influencers and,
strategic vendor partners.
Right.
Exactly.
in looking back, this is kind ofthe, this is the trick question
(50:10):
to authors that put a lot of theirtime, energy, and effort into a book.
If there's anything that youwould want to add to it now,
looking back, what might that be?
Anything you would be like, you knowwhat, this is maybe something I've
observed or learned since, or it's therest of the story or anything like that.
(50:30):
And I know that's a tough questionfor an author to say, this is
something that else, maybe it'syour next book, I don't know.
Oh, I think I'm one and done.
you're, you're like a one in a, you'relike, these guys that play college
ball for one season and they're
That's right.
anything,
you know,
back on it.
I was really pleased with my editor.
(50:50):
It took me five years.
So we started before the pandemic andthen pandemic hit and she had a young son.
It's like, look, I'llcall you in a year or two.
but I thought about it every day becauseI had the full outline, I had a direction.
(51:11):
And then what the publisher did,which I'm sure you had the same
experience, is it went through atleast three substantial edits and each
editor had a different angle to it.
I had one say, well, Brad, I'm sure youfeel better after writing that story,
but I don't think it adds to the book.
(51:31):
Why don't you take that one out?
And he was right.
You know, it was like, itwas kind of a. Inappropriate,
but I felt better writing it.
but I think that allowed me to, and Iwas able to share the manuscript with
a lot of people who worked with me atAccenture and the university, and they all
(51:54):
brought up different angles and things.
So, nothing pops intomy head at the moment.
Who would you say the book is for?
define the audience That you really,either you are writing it to them.
'cause sometimes when we're writing we'vegot someone or some type person in mind or
what you've observed as it's been releasedare gaining a lot of benefit from it.
(52:17):
Yeah.
I decided for people who wantto, Be in the C-suite someday.
they're managers.
I got a lot of feedbackfrom middle managers because
no one ever talks to them.
managing up and down I had a lotof positive feedback from middle
managers and people in the C-suite.
They said, geez, I wish Ihad read this 30 years ago.
(52:40):
I could have used some of these ideas.
on Amazon.
It's a bestseller in three categories,leadership, training, mentoring and
coaching and customer relations.
those were my target areas.
So I feel good about that.
Well, tell us where people can find,and I know Amazon, obviously that's a
(53:00):
place they can go get the book, but Ibelieve you got a place people can connect
with you and maybe read a sample of it.
So give us all that info now.
And I got one more quickquestion before we wrap up.
I'm gonna send you our.
Customized link to my websitethat's tied to your web, podcast.
It will send your listeners to, freesample the book, how to buy the book,
(53:23):
and how to schedule time on my calendar.
Very good.
And is that your, is thatyour personal website?
Go
Yeah, it's www brad engle.com.
Perfect.
And I think you said maybeyou'll do a slash seat.
Go create,
Yes.
that might be listening and don'thave the visual and the links that
we'll include, we'll do that and makesure, I'd love for people to connect
(53:45):
and get the book or connect with you.
I know that there'll be peoplethat'll really resonate with
your style and personality.
Brad, just, you got one morequick tip that maybe we didn't
cover that might help people?
There's the book against Fears ofInfluence that just might help 'em.
Just before we wrap up and Ifinish this up here, just something
Yeah, it, it, uh, back to my professor.
(54:07):
Get out from behind your screen.
Get outta your office andgo Tell people you care.
That is a great tip.
Brad Englert, thank you.
Thank you for writing this book.
Thank you for taking your extensivecareer that spanned from Chicago to
Australia to all over and writingthis book, spheres of Influence.
I'm holding it up for thosethat might be on, YouTube.
(54:29):
It might be a little fuzzy there.
And again, I love the subtitle,how to Create and Nurture
Authentic Business Relationships.
We'll have a link down below or you couldjump on Amazon and, I appreciate you Brad.
Great.
listening in.
This is Seat Go Create.
We've got new episodes everyMonday I am so thankful for all
the comments and everything thatwe keep seeing over on YouTube.
(54:51):
YouTube's really growing right now
Hmm.
I appreciate that.
Love what's going on withall the podcast channels.
thank you for all of that and just keeplistening and sharing and we will see
everyone next week on Seek Go Create.
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