Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Oh, so I know we talked a lot about, you know,the things that are important in leadership.
So I wanna leave you with this one last thing.
So employees, your good employees.
Okay?
They're gonna be loyal to your principles, andthey're not gonna be loyal to your preferences.
So if you need to have that man and ma'ammoment in the mirror, definitely start with
(00:21):
that.
Welcome to Inspired Choice Today.
I'm your host, Caroline Biesalski, here tobring you authentic stories, surprising
lessons, and powerful takeaways to fuel yourjourney in business and life.
In each episode, I'll take you from oneinspiring guest to the next, blending their
experiences with my expertise to uncoverpractical strategies you can use right away.
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Whether you're starting out or stepping up,stay tuned for insights and actionable tips
that make a difference.
And stick around until the end for a specialfreebie just for our listeners.
Hello, and welcome inspired podcast community.
This is your new episode.
My name is Caroline, and my today's guest isBrenda Neckvatal, and I'm so happy that she
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said yes to our interview.
How are you doing today?
I'm wonderful, Caroline.
Thank you so much for having me on.
So great to see you today, and I would like tointroduce you to the audience, of course.
You are a leadership expert.
You help overwhelmed leaders transformstruggling teams into high-performing
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powerhouses by navigating workplace drama anddifficult personalities.
Drawing from personal experience, you offerpractical strategies for resilient, effective
leadership.
Welcome to the inspired podcast.
Wow, Brenda Neckvatal.
Well, thank you very much.
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I'm inspired already.
My first question for you is yes.
What was the turning point that shifted yourleadership approach from struggling to
thriving?
Oh, that's easy.
It's an easy answer that really involved a hardpath.
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I was introduced to my very firsthigh-performing team, like, super
high-performing team when I was 30 years old.
I had been on unsuccessful teams, but what madethis team different than any other team I was
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part of in the past is that all of the leaders,all the way up to the location general manager
down to his first assistant and all the othermanagers that worked under him, held to a
certain standard.
I mean, they all had their unique, you know,personalities.
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They all had their quirks.
They all had, you know, what made them them.
But when I started working with them, I sawthem operating and activating in a completely
different way than I had ever seen.
I listened to what they said.
I paid attention to how they talked to people.
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When they would all get together and read thesame book and then talk about the lessons that
they learned from the book, when I would seethem carrying a book, I would run out and I
would go get it for myself.
Right?
So imitation is, you know, the best form offlattery.
Right?
So that's what I started doing.
I started emulating what they were doing, and Istarted practicing what I saw them doing.
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Like, I could figure out, well, you know, whenyou have somebody that is at this temperature,
right, then there's a way of handling that.
And if you have somebody that's at thistemperature, there's a way of handling that.
And what about holding people accountable?
Like, I started listening to how they weredoing it.
Not so much the words that they were saying,but their approach.
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They weren't standing in a place of lowconfidence doing it.
They were all in a position of confidencebecause they had principles that they were
operating from.
And so once I figured out what those were, theworld just opened up.
What a great answer.
Thank you so much.
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I said I'm inspired already in the beginning.
Now even more, of course, you talked aboutprinciples, and this is so important, and also
about emulating the people, like leadingexamples or the people you work with.
I love that so much.
Okay.
My next question for you is how can leaderseffectively handle difficult personalities
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without causing team friction?
Well, first off, you have to accept the factthat you can't ever hide from friction.
It's going to be now if you're looking at itfrom the perception of, like, okay.
We got friction and we have conflict right now.
How am I gonna prevent making it worse?
I think that is a better approach to takebecause you can't avoid friction.
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You can't start a fire without striking amatch.
Right?
You just you just can't.
So friction has to be present.
The question is, how good are you at utilizingfriction to keep success happening?
Right?
That's it.
And there's no one formula for that, butthere's three things that you can do.
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Okay?
And they're extremely important.
The first thing is that we need to get better.
We need to listen more and talk less.
So if you want to prevent friction fromincreasing, listen more and talk less, and
listen to what people are saying.
Listen to how they are saying they're handlingsomething.
Listen, because they're gonna tell you.
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They're gonna tell you their opinions.
They're gonna tell you who they think is up todoing what.
They're gonna tell you exactly what you askthem.
So that leads to the second thing, which isthat you have to ask good questions in order to
get good answers.
Right?
So one of the best questions that a leader canask when all of a sudden you're dealing with
friction is help me understand.
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Help me understand how did we get here.
Help me understand who's involved.
Help me understand why this is happening.
Help me understand what's missing from thisformula.
Help me understand what people haven't saidjust yet that we're not listening to.
Right?
There are so many different ways to utilizehelp me understand, and what it does is it
actually cuts away the ego.
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That's what's important.
Because navigating the ego is going to—if youdo it well, you're going to have the right
friction in place.
If you don't do it well, you're going to throwgasoline on fire, and it's not really what you
wanna do.
And then finally, the third thing is that thepower of your leadership will always lie in
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your follow-up.
So many leaders have a conversation in theirhead that they don't have time for follow-up.
It's a time suck from everything else thatthey're doing.
Well, if having a high-performing team isimportant to you, that is a crucible in being
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able to make an asset or create an asset thatreally it's hard to defeat.
Right?
So those are kind of the three things that Ialways advise people.
And knowing it and practicing it are twototally different things.
Yes.
That's so true.
Thank you so much.
And while you were talking in the beginning, Ithought about I heard someone saying, God gave
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you two ears and one mouth.
So about the listening part, you know, thatlistening is more important than talking or
also when you mention the leader asking thepeople, help me understand or something that
reduces or I mean, that sets back the ego andsays I'll deal with you later.
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Of course.
Help me understand this is the task of aleader.
And then you talked about following up.
This is so important.
No one does this or, I mean, the majority ofthe people are not doing it correctly.
Yes.
And I think the power lies in the
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I think a lot of leaders will follow-up withthings that are not going well, but there's a
pretty substantial number of leaders that don'tfollow-up when things are going great.
And so that's the missing element.
Or some people just expect, you know, theycorrect, they put somebody on a course of
direction, a correction course, and theyanticipate that person doing it.
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Like, everybody should.
They should absolutely expect it.
But if they don't follow up and you havesomebody that has a low set of core values, you
know, look, water is always gonna find the pathof least resistance and sometimes so do people.
Right?
So by not doing it because they know thatsomebody doesn't follow up, that's how this
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perpetual problem stays in motion.
Yes.
And you said knowing it doesn't help you.
You have to apply it.
Of course, we have this knowing-doing gap.
I heard about this once.
One of my mentors was talking about that.
How about your coaches and mentors?
Do you have coaches for yourself, and who isthe best coach you ever had?
(09:47):
So I have had I've been investing in myself nowfor a long time.
And so I have several coaches, and I have evenI still have mentors to this day.
Even though, you know, I'm at a level ofproficiency, there's still room for knowledge.
Right?
So, one of my so I have active and inactive.
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So one of my favorite mentors of all time wasthat location general manager.
I still talk to him to this day, going back,you know, when I was 30.
So that was a long time ago.
And I have three mentors now that I'm workingunder for three very different things that I
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absolutely adore.
So I have a lot of them.
So they all do they all do different things.
Yeah.
It's so important.
A mentor saves you time.
When you said it was when you were 30, so itwas two years ago.
Right?
Yeah.
We'll leave it at that.
Yeah.
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So great.
I have another question, of course.
Let's see.
What practical steps can leaders take totransform workplace drama into team alignment
and engagement?
Well, we could spend about seven hours on thisquestion.
So the first thing is I think you have to takea step back and ask yourself, do I have the
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right people in position?
I think that's a big thing because you canpreach and practice your core values.
You can work hard to build trust.
But the thing is that if you don't have thepeople that are capable of doing that or
willing to leave behind what they think andtake that risk and shift their thinking moving
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forward, I think you're gonna struggle.
Right?
So that comes down to core values.
And core values really are and this comes fromone of my favorite mentors actually.
Core values are the evidence that which we saytruly matters as a foundation for action that
really aligns with our beliefs.
Right?
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So the proof of what we value isn't in ourpreferences, it's in actually what we do.
And so when we're not operating based off ofcore values, we're only operating off of our
preferences, and our preferences don't holdweight.
But our principles do because it's a place thatwe can act from.
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So if we're always acting from our preferences,then we're not really acting from a position of
value.
We're only acting from a position that issubjective.
Thank you so much for your answer and yourpatience as well.
Of course, I have another question for you.
It is about where can we find you when peoplewant to reach out to you after listening to
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this episode.
Yes.
Absolutely.
So I actually, I'm on all of the social mediachannels as my name, Brenda.
But I have a gift for your listeners.
Yeah.
So if you wanna get inspired and then takeaction because, you know, that's what you need
in order to make inspiration to really bloom, Ihave a free course that they can take.
(13:07):
It's called Impact Scripts, and I've only givenyou one of them.
And these are three scripts that I've used,three phrases that I've used for over 20 years
that have helped me deal with difficult people,that have helped me, like, really enrich
communication.
And I'm very committed to a very strongcommunication, meaning that I'm responsible for
mine and I take it very seriously.
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It's one of my core values.
And if you go to my website at heybrenda.com,h-e-y, Brenda dot com, then when the first
thing you'll see is, a little spot where youput in it's like, what's the one thing that
wowed you in the show?
And then you put in your name, you put in youremail address, and it's gonna give you access
to this course.
(13:49):
And in this course, those three sentences, nowI already used help me understand.
Okay?
There's a couple more and maybe a bonus thatyou can go ahead and take and actually utilize,
and you can use this at any point in time.
And it is my free gift to you, and I promiseyou, it is going to help you cut through a lot
of drama if you're experiencing drama.
And it's also gonna help you be extremelyeffective if you're looking to be effective.
(14:14):
Well, thank you so much for sharing.
This is so generous.
Of course, I put the links in the show notes.
Thank you so much.
Please reach out to Brenda.
She's amazing.
She shares her knowledge and wisdom with us andinspires us to take action.
My last question for you is, do you set goalsfor yourself or intentions, and what is one of
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your next projects?
So I always have a ton of projects going on.
I do set my goals.
I look at not only do I set my goals, but Ilive within them every month.
So I take a look back at what my goals are,what are the objectives?
In other words, what are the things that I needto do in order to make that goal come to life?
(15:00):
And I take a look at that every month,sometimes every week, kinda depending on what
I'm working on, but I keep it relatively highlevel.
And then I have them set for the year as well.
So I break it down into year, quarter, month,and week.
And, of course, then everything else is a to-dolist.
So yeah.
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So I do.
And projects that are coming up, I'm actuallyhelping a friend of mine drop his new book,
which is called Ethos of a Leader, and it iswritten by a U.S.
Navy SEAL, and that should be coming outsometime in March.
So I've written nine books, and you can findmine at Mission Ready.
I have Two Wolves, and you can easily find mybooks on Amazon.
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I love it.
Thank you so much for sharing and also for ourinterview.
I'm inspired now still.
And now it's time for your final thoughts tothe audience, please.
Oh, so I know we talked a lot about, you know,the things that are important in leadership.
So I wanna leave you with this one last thing.
(16:05):
So employees, your good employees.
Okay?
They're gonna be loyal to your principles, andthey're not gonna be loyal to your preferences.
So if you need to have that man and ma'ammoment in the mirror, definitely start with
that.
Thank you so much for our interview.
(16:27):
Yes, it was a great conversation.
I learned so much about leadership.
Please reach out to Brenda.
Yes, I put the links in the show notes, ofcourse.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I'll see you in the next episode.
Thank you for listening to "Inspired ChoiceToday." I'm thrilled to have you on this
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journey of growth and transformation.
Don't forget to hit follow or subscribe to stayconnected and never miss an episode.
And here's something special.
Grab your free 20-minute breakthrough sessionwith me.
It's designed to help you kick-start or levelup your business.
Just check out the show notes for more.
(17:12):
Until next time, keep making those inspiredchoices.
See you in the next episode.