High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 604: Best Practices in High Performance Leadership with Dr. Andy Neillie, Keynote Speaker, Executive Coach and Business Owner

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Speaking, training and leading teams have characterized the past 20 years of Andy’s career. He is a keynote speaker, corporate trainer, coach and consultant. He travels weekly to present workshops on leadership and sales-related topics for numerous Fortune 500 firms as well as small and mid-sized companies, trade groups and associations.  In addition to teaching leadership principles for Concordia University’s MBA program, Dr. Andy published his first book, The Golden Principles: Life and Leadership Lessons from a Rescued Dog, which uses simple lessons learned from a Golden Retriever about living well and leading well. It was honored by Amazon.com with a “Top 100 Best Books of the Year” award. Clients hire him to help them develop their leaders because he is one: He owns several businesses, manages a team of key leaders, and owns the ultimate P&L responsibilities for several million dollars of annual revenues.  In this episode, Cindra and Andy discuss:  The 4 Leadership Necessities  The 10 Golden Principles  How and why you should “fail fast and fix” Strategies to be a high-performing leader How he and his wife built a franchise swim school that provided over 200,000 swim lessons last year HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ANDY  FOLLOW SIGN UP FOR THE FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH CINDRA’S TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode.  

Welcome to Episode 604. This is Dr. Sindhara Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here on Episode 604 on the High Performance Mindset. Today we talk about best practices in high performance leadership with Dr. Andy Neely. And I'm the founder of the Mentally Strong Institute, where we help purpose-driven leaders and athletes play big and achieve their most audacious goals. If you want to achieve your goals quicker, up-level your confidence and increase your influence, I invite you to sign up for a free coaching call with one of my team members at freementalbreakthroughcall.com. We will help you create a breakthrough, a moment of more clarity and understanding and help you achieve and practice the high performance mindset. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call.

Now, in today's episode, 604, I interview Dr. Andy Neely, and speaking training and leading teams have characterized the past 20 years of Dr. Andy's career. He is a keynote speaker, a corporate trainer, a coach, and a consultant. He travels weekly to present workshops on leadership and sales-related topics for numerous Fortune 500 firms, as well as small and mid-sized companies, trade groups, and associations. In addition to teaching leadership principles for Concordia University's MBA program, Dr. Andy published his first book, The Golden Principles, Life and Leadership Lessons from a Rescue Dog. We talk a little bit about these 10 principles today in the episode.

And he used the simple lessons he learned from a golden retriever about living well and leading well. This book was honored by Amazon as one of the top 100 best books of the year. Now, clients hire him to develop their leaders because he's one of them. He owns several businesses, manages a team of key leaders, and owns the ultimate P&L responsibilities for several million dollars of annual revenues. And in this episode, Dr. Andy and I talk about the four leadership necessities, the 10 golden principles,

how and why you should fail fast and fix, love that one, strategies to become a high-performing leader, and how he and his wife built a franchise swim school that provided over 200,000 swim lessons last year. If you'd like to see the full show notes and description of this episode, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 604 for episode 604. Let's go. Without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Andy. Dr. Andy, welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I'm so excited that you're here.

I can't wait to talk to you more about leadership principles. So just welcome to the podcast first. Oh, Sandra, I'm so glad. I've thoroughly enjoyed all the conversations you and I've had. I feel like I've got a fellow personal development and leadership junkie. And so I know we're going to have some great conversation together. Yeah, we are. And you're right. We are both junkies. You know what? And there's so many things that have impressed me about you, Dr. Andy.

And so I just want to get started. And I know everyone listened to my introduction where I introduced you. But wow, I think about all the people that you've already positively impacted in your business. And not only do you own the Neely Leadership Group, but you and your wife own several indoor year-round kind of child-focused franchise swim Right. And you just mentioned that your swim school provided 207,916 swim lessons each year last year. Last year. Yes. Last year. Yes. We're growing 207,916 swim lessons. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And tell us a little bit about what called you to do that work to begin with, and why do you still do that work with your swim schools?

Well, really, I'm glad that you said call to do it because it's a total hand of God thing, Cendra. I am passionate about, as you can see behind me, turning managers into leaders and feel like that's what I'm supposed to do. And like you, I think I've got an ability to communicate well. And so my focus has been workshops and conferences and keynotes and writing and blogging on leadership development. But the swim school story is really a family story. 30 years ago, when our 32-year-old daughter was two years old, my wife found a lifeguard who showed up in our backyard, Mr. Ron the lifeguard and his girlfriend,

Miss Jane. And they taught swim lessons for our little two-year-old at that time. And my wife is kind of an organizer. And we ended up having a bunch of kids from the neighborhood and church show up in our backyard. We became friends with Mr. Ron and Miss Jane. A year and a half later, our then four-year-old daughter was the flower girl in their wedding friends with Mr. Ron and Miss Jane a year and a half later. Our then four-year-old daughter was the flower girl in their wedding. And Mr. Ron, the lifeguard, became a dear family friend. Fast forward 30 years later, and Mr. Ron Ciero is the master franchisor of the largest international network of swim schools in the world, Aquatots. He and I continue to be friends. We are kind of journaling buddies and daredevil buddies. We scuba dive together. We love to do adventure stuff.

And about 15 years ago now, my wife and I had moved from Phoenix where Aquatots was headquartered to Austin. And he asked me to bring Aquitots to Texas. And so we were the first Aquitots. We opened it. Interestingly enough, Cinder, you and I know the rhythm of our consulting work, 2008, 2009, things slowed down quite a bit for the work I was doing with my clients. And so I had the flexibility and time and my wife and I dived in and we launched Aquatots. 15 years later, it is turned into, we have five of the facilities, about 160 Aquatots around the globe. My wife and I own five of them. Yeah. And it's hard for me to believe, but we're in the spring of the year right now. So I'm still summarizing our last year's

budgets and our last year's impact. And we just pulled the numbers together about a month ago, 207,916 lessons at these indoor year-round pools. So as you and I agreed just before we turned the camera on, while I'm really passionate about working with firms, organizations, nonprofits, and associations about leadership development, leading the team of managers and aquatic staff at these five swim schools, this may be the most important work that I've done. There are some kids that are alive today that wouldn't be if they hadn't gone through our swim schools. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think

about how many people that you've saved, right. And I say that because my mom, my mother never learned to swim and, you know, and obviously a different, different age than I am, but, you know, just wasn't accepted and the things that she can't do because she doesn't know how to swim and the lives that you you've saved. And I also want to say, I appreciate that you have real world experience doing what you teach, right? And I appreciate you saying that because, Cendra, I think my voice around leadership development has gotten so much stronger in the last 15 years because I've been talking with leaders about the need to have hard conversations with

their team members for years. I had a hard conversation the start of this week that's got a follow-up conversation coming out of it. Yeah, you're exactly right. I'm in the trenches. My wife and I have grown a business from nothing to a very substantial business, making a big difference. And I've also got 125 people working for us. I've got 10 managers that report directly to me. And these leadership principles that you and I are going to talk about are field tested. They're not just theory. Absolutely. And so as people are listening, I know they're curious about, gosh, how in the world did you build this? Because there are some entrepreneurs who listen to the podcast.

And so I want to just hear a little bit about, can you tell us about building a successful business and the mindset it took to succeed in that? And what do you think was behind your success building it from zero to now 207,916 lessons last year? Well, every overnight success, maybe not everyone, but pretty much everyone is 10 years in the making. And if you and I were having this conversation 10, 11, 12 years ago, I would be saying, we're doing the right things. I hope we're going to

become successful. I will still say those things today because you're always at the whim of forces larger than you, forces that are out of your control. And any entrepreneur has to recognize there is an ongoing tension between risk and success. And anybody who aspires to lead an organization, who desires to lead a movement, who desires to lead people from where they are to where they need to be, it is always a risky endeavor. I've laid my head down many nights in bed next to my wife and said, honey, I'm not sure what this is going to look like. Here's how we're pushing forward. And I just don't know how it's going to work out. And I think that's, in fact, Sandra, I think part of my ongoing frustration with Entrepreneur Magazine and Forbes and LinkedIn is we hear all the success stories and everything looks so polished and wonderful and strategic.

John Maxwell has written a whole bunch of leadership books. My favorite book of his is called Failing Forward. And I think the reason it is, is found in the title, right? Where, you know what? Most of the time it's risk and failure and you just have to get up one more time. And I think, you know, for me, I'm not sure I'm wired as a classic entrepreneur. I'm not a fast twitch. I'm not an extrovert necessarily. But I'm just stubborn enough that I just got up the next morning and tried to take the next step and then got up the following morning and tried to take the next step. And I think if there's anything I would say for me that has differentiated success from risk and failure was, you know what,

I just got up the next morning and tried to take the next step. I think there are other people who are bigger, faster, stronger than me that would have said, you know, my 10-year overnight success I accomplished in four years, I will tell you my 10-year overnight success we've accomplished in 14 or 15 years. Of course, COVID was thrown into the middle of that. 2008, 2009, 2010 was thrown into the middle of that. But at the end of the day, I think it's the people who just keep moving forward. You probably could tell some great stories from the track about, you know, you just got to put one foot in front of the other and you don't know how the outcome is going to be. Yeah, I completely agree that, you know, I wrote a book called Beyond

Grit for Business and Angie Bastian, who I've had on the podcast before, started Angie's Boom Chicka Pop popcorn. You probably have you heard of this? It's like the best popcorn and it's, you know, good for you. But anyway, you know, she started it from her garage with her husband and now, you know, recently sold it a couple of years ago to ConAgra for a quarter of a billion dollars. Yeah. And so we hear like the quarter of a billion dollars. Yeah. And so we hear like the quarter of a billion dollars, right? And we don't see the struggles and what it takes. And I appreciate what you said about this ratio of success to risk to success and, you know, what that equation looks like. And so many times, I think even as an entrepreneur myself, I'm worried about, I can

get worried about what if I try this and it doesn't work? Or if I take this risk where I try, you know, this new thing, and what if I fall on my face? And there's going to be so much fear. I love this acronym for fear, and it's not my acronym. I wish it was, right? But I don't know who wrote this. But it stands for false evidence appearing real. And isn't that so true, right? That we can just make things up in our head. Can you give us an example of a risk that you took that paid off and how you worked through that yourself? Yeah. In fact, as you and I record this podcast, we are 47 months past, almost to the day from when we all had to lock our doors and go home. And none of us knew what the future looked like. And at that point, my consulting and my coaching and my keynote speaking and my

workshops that I was doing, they pulled the plugs and all of that. We also locked the doors on our swim schools at that point. Right. Because we had no idea if you could get sick and how you could get sick, right? Yeah. Everything shut down. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you're in my consulting and peak performance and leadership development businesses, there are ongoing costs, but nothing compared to having four leases with four national landlords for four 6,000 square foot shopping center indoor locations where pools needed chemicals put in them and heaters needed to be maintained and things. And Cinder, one of the things I did is I just said, all right, managers, none of us know what tomorrow holds, but we're going to get on a call today and figure out how do we get from today to tomorrow. And

tomorrow we'll have another phone call and we'll figure out what it looks like moving forward. And then pretty quickly, like all of us, we pivoted to Teams or Zoom for our meetings, and we started meeting every day. And I think a couple of the things we learned was, first of all, if you're going to fail, fail fast and fix. So you made a mistake. It wasn't a mistake. Unless you keep repeating that same mistake and expecting different outcome, it's not really a mistake.

Fail fast and fix. And then the other one is we taught ourselves to have confident uncertainty. This is what we know today. And so we're going to move forward with this. And if we find out we're wrong tomorrow, we're not going to look back and blame ourselves and kick ourselves. We're simply going to figure out the reality tomorrow and then modify along the way. I'm not sure either one of those ideas are new ideas. In fact, the fail fast and fix sounds like a truism that I probably heard someplace back there and I just pulled it out when we were trying to

figure things out. I'm a fellow athlete. I'm a slalom water skier in the summers. I never ski on the weekends. It's always the lakes too crowded, but my license plate on my trailer says dawn skier. I'm skiing about 6. or 645 in the morning during the summers. And one of the things about skiing is if you're going to go fast behind a boat and there's lakes, you're going to fall. And that doesn't mean you fail. That just means, all right, well, have the boat loop around again, grab their open, pop back up, right? Fail fast and fix. And so I think those two lessons, fail fast and fix, and then have a level of confident uncertainty. I think if you and I look at personal leadership development for entrepreneurs,

organizational development, my passion around helping managers become leaders, all of this really has to do with you've got to figure out your own path along the way. Don't be limited by fear. Measure it carefully. If you fail 15 or 20 times in a row doing the same thing, you're probably not ready for leadership yet, but learn from your lessons and then move forward. Absolutely. Well, and I mean, you help turn managers into leaders.

And so I'm kind of curious about how have you implemented these principles? I love fail fast and fix, right? Because that means like you're learning, you're growing from it. And then, you know, manage that fear carefully. I think sometimes people don't even know the fear they experienced. They're not even aware of it, nor do they manage it, right? And then this last one, confident uncertainty. How does, you know, as people are listening and they're, we're all leaders in some way, right? Maybe we're not managers, but we all lead ourselves or we lead other people. How do you think these principles that you've just mentioned, how does that help people in leadership? Well, I think it, first of all, it gives you permission that you don't have to be right before you move forward. You move forward and then you figure out what's right and you stay open and you and to work with a team around you that has a culture of understanding

strengths and weaknesses, extending grace to the teachable, seeking first to understand before being understood, some of these pretty deep-rooted kind of personal convictions. And when you build that type of resilience, you just have to courageously step into it. We've hired a bunch of people over the years at our small enterprise who came in with the wounds of bad bosses. In fact, I'm one of them. I think one of the reasons I'm so passionate about leadership development is I just had a couple of early bad bosses and you just realize that this is not good. This is just not good. Jerry, one of my first bosses on a construction crew when I was in high school and college, was a bad boss.

And I remember sitting underneath his authority thinking it shouldn't be this way. It just shouldn't be this way. I didn't know what it should be like, but I knew his anger management issues that came out at work violently at times were wrong. And part of that is you and I have got to hold up the mirror to ourselves humbly and say, who I am as an effective leader is always more important than what I do. They're both important. It's not one or the other, but who I am is always going to take precedent over what I do if I'm growing in influence as a leader.

Yeah, I love that. Who I am is more important than what I do. And I think it makes people take a step back and say, well, who do I want to be and be more intentional with that? Instead of just show up by my default or what I'm used to, or maybe how I've seen other people lead. Well, and the scary thing is when you try to practice that, you open yourself up to that risk you and I've been talking about because who I want to be as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a leader is someone that people grow underneath. Well, for them to grow, that means they have to go through trial and error, which means they bring additional risk to the equation at times. And I've lost money. I've lost momentum. I've lost

credibility at times because our enterprise has done things that weren't the best it could have been done because we delegated that decision to somebody that made a mistake. That's part of the risk. The flip side of that is I'm a small business owner with a retail environment. People have come and stayed. I have people that have been with us for 12 years. People don't stay in a retail environment for 12 years. We've changed people's lives because they've come and stayed. And they went from drinking the Kool-Aid to pouring the Kool-Aid to reproducing some of these key concepts you and I are talking about in people underneath them. So there's a lifetime satisfaction on that, but it's risky along the way.

Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that. That just shows that you're doing a really incredible job of leadership if people want to stay. Hi, this is Cyndra Campoff, and thanks for listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively, and get to your goals quicker, visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon.

And so it makes me think a little bit about Dr. Andy, about your four leadership necessities, and you've been speaking and training and leading teams, you know, doing this for, you know, 20 years in your career. Tell us about what those four leadership necessities are and how we could use these in our own leadership, no matter how we lead. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think you and I, for being really honest, we've just got to be honest. There's nothing new in leadership development. There's 15,000 people like you and me that are trying to kick a dent in the world. The good news is we each have our own little parts of the universe that we're kicking that dent in. But Jesus Christ, Marcus Aurelius, you could kind of close the chapter on good leadership principles

by the time you get to the end of the first century. I think it's been 2000 years. But everybody processes that a little bit differently. And I remember bad bosses and trying to figure out what does a good boss look like? And a couple of the things emerged relatively quickly. And a lot of us have talked about them, the need for competence and the need for character. You've got to be good at what you do. And you've got to be a person rich in character that others will follow, character and competence. Norman Schwarzkopf talked about this 20 years ago in Desert Storm about the type of soldier that they were looking for to lead people into the battle, and others have talked about that. As I was working with management teams, as I was developing my own leadership voice, I said, yep, those are critically important. There's more to it as well, though. One of the differences between a manager and a leader is a manager has their eyes down, and probably correctly so. They've got a production floor they're responsible for. They've got a project management tool that they're responsible

for. They've got a team that's supposed to build a certain number of widgets. They've got their eyes down. Leaders increasingly have their eyes up. And so in addition to competence and character, I recognize good leaders. They have a certain degree of conviction. They believe the organization needs to move into the future. And so they begin to be strategic about that. And really they're strategic in three ways. Three questions I ask emerging leaders to think about. How are you thinking bigger, where you're getting your eyes off just your part of the production process and thinking about the entire plant? Okay. How are you thinking broader?

And that has to do with, are you looking at market trends? Are you trying to take a step outside even your organization to understand competitors, to understand international impact of the economy? And then the third question I ask them is, how are you thinking further into the future? Because strategic leaders need to be thinking 18 months, three years. I think we all used to say you need to have a 10-year strategic plan. In 2024, 10-year strategic plans are hard to come by because we don't know what AI is going to do to any of us in the next 18 months. But three years, 18 months, five years. So are you thinking bigger? Are you thinking broader? Are you thinking further? That allows you to become more strategic.

Cinder, the last element, I knew I was still missing something. I looked at the leaders that were really effective and I thought, there is something else here that's going on that goes beyond them being rich in character themselves, that goes beyond them being able to get their teams to execute a high level of competence, that goes beyond them seeing the bigger picture. In fact, there was this beautiful snapshot. I'm working with an insurance company right now. It's just this beautiful picture. One of their team members was a high school athlete, and he was a very successful high school athlete, not quite as successful as you, but very successful, qualified to go to some national competition. He came from a family that struggled financially, and he let his coach know, I can't get the tickets back to Philadelphia. My family can't

afford that. And the coach said, oh, no problem. Our school has a special fund. When we have athletes that excel as much as you do, there's a special fund and we'll be able to cover all the costs. Wow. Cinder, it didn't come out for years. The school had no special fund. The coach took his own credit card out and paid for the athletes flights and hotel and experience. And nobody knew it for years. In fact, it only came out almost by happenstance. And I realized that's it. That coach, that leader, that teacher, that man that was growing up an athlete underneath him understood there's a

promise you make. And so I grappled with the language around it, but I've got my three Cs. So we've got character, we've got competence, we've got conviction. And the fourth element, Cendra, is what I call covenant. Now covenant's kind of a fashion word, but covenant, it's both a formal and a personal promise. For instance, I live in the state of Texas. Here in Texas, if somebody's going to get married, it's the personal side, love and affection forever and ever in sickness and in health for richer, for poor. There's also a formal document that is signed by the officiant recorded in the Secretary of State's office. There's both a personal side and a formal side. That coach had a formal responsibility to help his athlete excel. There was also a personal expense that that coach incurred without anybody

knowing it to help that athlete become all they could be. I suspect a number of your listeners, and I know a number of the people that I've talked with, they can tell their own stories of, you know what? Yeah, she didn't have any PTO left, but her mom had cancer. She needed another three weeks and we just made it happen, right? That's the richness of covenant. And when I finally got my language around what I was seeing good leaders do, I realized that covenant thing is, it builds violent loyalty. People will go through walls for you. Now, there has to be a balance, and particularly in a post-COVID world where we're all kind of wounded and beat up, I think we as leaders, sometimes we mistake being nice

for being kind. We still have organizations that we have to drive to perform. Many of us have P&Ls that we've got to be responsible to. We've got profitability numbers. We have markets that we need to be aware of. We've got competitive threats that we've got to prepare for. So we can't just be a nice nonprofit leader who gives everything away. We have to make hard decisions. We have to have hard conversations. But at the end of the day, leaders who understand leadership and not just management, they realize I sacrifice the most. We pay the most. We're at the bottom of the pyramid. We're not at the top of the pyramid. And so that for me was the final ingredient. When I finally realized, what do I see good leaders doing?

They're people of conviction. They see the bigger picture. They're competent enough that they can drive their teams to execute well. They're rich in character themselves, fair-minded, honest, other-oriented, things like that. And then they practice this covenant of balancing the formal responsibilities with the personal richness. I've talked to July. You kind of got me up on my soapbox, but it was a long time in the making. This really was not me deciding what I wanted to say about leadership. It was me observing good leaders. If you're going to be a good leader, there's four things you've got to be working on,

the four leadership necessities. Sorry about talking too much about it. I'll get off. Oh, no, it's perfect. Well, this is what I was going to say. I love what you wrote. And this is on the handout on your four necessities. And I'm just going to read this because I think the covenant word is powerful. It said, you said, effective leaders live by an unspoken promise to their team members. I'm here for you. That's what a leadership covenant is all about. This includes time, focus, energy, highly relating skills, and a commitment to put their team members first.

And it's a challenge, right? I think we can fall off both sides. We can be, in 2024, Jack Welsh, the greatest CEO of the 1990s, we're going to promote the A's, we're going to put the B's on plan and we're going to fire the C's. I don't think that works in the 2020s anymore because we're all struggling with staff shortages and we are responsible, as Simon Sinek says, to grow our people internally. But that also has to be balanced with, at the end of the day, we can't give away our sustainability. I talk to my retail managers regularly about, folks, the reason we look at budgets so often is not because we're money focused,

but we want to be around next year to continue to impact kids' lives. That requires us to look at our finances carefully this year. There's that tension of formal and personal. It never goes away. I think it's one of those dynamic tensions that a good leader, you never get it right. Was I too easy on that person? Was I too hard on that situation? If you're not wrestling with that tension, you're probably not wrestling enough. Well, I appreciate just the language that you just shared about budget because sometimes people can think, wow, they're always focused on the money, but you're right. You just want to be able to be around and sustain the passion that you have. I also love what you wrote about character, Dr. Andy, and you wrote,

people follow people because of who they are, not just what they do. Fair, honest, others oriented, the list goes on. The idea of servant leadership is an idea whose time has come again, right? Effective leaders are the bottom of the organizational chart, not the top, selfishly serving the people that they lead. And when I think about, because just like you, I've had more effective leaders than others, you know. And I remember, actually, it's kind of interesting how we both have like these high school memories of a boss I had that had some of the same kind of anger issues, you know, and I didn't stay there for very long, you know, because it didn't feel like a safe place for me. You never knew what

was expected, you know. But tell us a little bit about how do we know that, I'm thinking about these four leadership necessities. First, how do we know if we're actually practicing them and how do we practice them? Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I work a lot with frontline managers. I do a lot of CEO advising. These four leadership necessities apply at any level of leadership, but they apply differently. I think the questions we need to be asking ourselves, probably, Cinder, is how am I growing in being fair-minded? How am I growing in being self-effacing and focused on others? Am I trying to become a better person myself? And then am I availing myself of the

things that will make me a better business person? For frontline people, I've gone in and done some training on how to read a P&L and a balance sheet and a cashflow statement, because all of a sudden you're in charge of a team of 11 people who have some production goals and you need to see that bigger picture. I recently finished up an engagement with a COO who had been asked to scale themselves to become the CEO and their needs were to become more people-oriented. They were very happy in front of spreadsheets and Gantt charts and less happy in front of people. And it required us to, you know, they had some online self-assessments I had them take, and we talked about their disk profile and where they fit in an organization. And they had to make the decision, am I going to take those steps in developing the soft skills

of people interactions to compliment my ability to run spreadsheets well. So it really is, you've got to take yourself from where you're at and figure out what is the next step for me. Now, I try to say it pretty carefully. I don't know if anybody ever arrives. Let me ask the question I ask. If you want to know if you're becoming a high-performing leader, are you working on these four areas? And I think if you're working on these four areas, at the end of the day, you can say, I'm in the journey. I'm not sure any of us ever fully arrive. I agree with that. And I think about even training our mind and training ourselves. It takes daily effort. And because we're human and we get in our own way and we have a negativity bias. But I appreciate that you just ask these questions like, how are you doing? And are you becoming a better person? Or how am I growing today? So you said, how am I growing? And am I becoming a better person? I think about really great leaders, is they are working on themselves, which takes time, you know, which takes like effort, and we can't just be going, going, going and doing, doing, doing, we have to also consider

like, how are we showing up as a recent podcast guest I talked about, or I talked with for episode 600, Dr. Andy, we talked about human beings versus human doings. And I love that idea that it's like so many times we can just be do, do, do, do, do. We don't even think about like, how am I leading today? Who am I showing up as? Who am I? Yeah. You know, Cinder, I've done an exercise all over the globe for the last 20 years when I'm in a workshop setting. And I've even done it like on a big, big stage. It's a little harder to do to get the interaction. But I'll simply ask people to develop a short list of the best bosses they ever worked for. No names, just the things that made them the best bosses.

And then I'll capture those things, those bullets, those ideas they came up with on a flip charter or whiteboard behind me. And then we go to the next step and I say, all right, so you built this list with me. Now let's define this list. If that bullet that you gave me was primarily who they were, I'm going to put a W in front of it. If it was primarily what they did, I'm going to put a D in front of it. And then I work with my participants or with my client to come up with all the W's and all the D's. Cindra, I've done this hundreds of times from India to Australia, to New Jersey, to California, to London and places in between, once in 20 years, have the Ds outweighed the Ws. Now, they're both there. It is not just, you got to be a really good person and you don't have to be competent. No,

you've got to have some capital Ds to be a good leader. But I would say, if I could summarize at this point, literally thousands of people in management positions saying, here's a good boss. They would say 65 to 75% of what made my best boss, my best boss was the capital W, the who they were. The capital D was still important, what they did. So it's not a either or, but that truism that you and I both heard, you'll never be a better leader than you are a person. It starts with that. The first job of any leader is to lead themselves well. Now, if I could put an asterisk on that, Cindra, that can be pretty guilt invoking for some of us that wake up and realize, you know what? I really wasn't on my game yesterday. Every day is a new

day. That's part of fail fast and fix is fail fast and fix yourself. Get up tomorrow morning and get back in front of your computer and do the discipline work you need to do or prepare for that team meeting or finalize that spreadsheet or whatever the work is that needs to be done. Fail fast, but then fix yourself as well. And tomorrow's always a new day. Well, it makes sense, Dr. Andy. I love, thanks for describing that W's and the D's. I love that. And it makes me just reflect again on your four leadership necessities. You have to be competent and that's the D you just described, but the who is the conviction and the character and the covenant, right?

That's how you show up. Lead yourself well and never, what did you say? Never be a better leader than you are a better person. Yeah, you'll never be a better leader than you are a person, long term. Short term, maybe not, but long term, you'll never be a better leader than you are a person. Yeah, Sindra, in one of my books be a better leader than you are a person. Yeah. Sandra, in one of my books, I just tell this horrible, horrible story. I was working with a multinational technology company.

I was doing a series of coaching workshops, how to coach your people to improve their performance. The managers for this division were in the back of the workshop while the participants, the frontline managers were in the front and the workshop while the participants, the frontline managers were in the front and the managers in the back were doing that bad thing you and I both seen in workshops we've led where they're on their laptops and they're leaning over talking with one another. And I just wanted to kick them out of the room. But at one point, I ended up writing up on a flip chart with them what's in it for me. We were talking about the value of change in your team members. And I wrote with them up on this flip chart and we're dialoguing about how do you make sure that

when you're coaching somebody, it's not just about, hey, meet our numbers, improve our quota, do this and do this. It's got to be for them as well. The with them, what's in it for me from your team members perspective. Sindra, I almost hate retelling the story, but it's so powerfully captures how character makes or breaks a leader one of the managers in the back of the room at that point stopped his chit-chatting with the other senior leaders looked up and said what you just right up there and i said whiff him what's in it for me and he at that point turned and whispered to the person and there was a little bit of awkward chuckling and something else happened and And Sandra, here's what came out. This was a number of years ago. At that point, there was a website

that none of us should be going on that had those initials or initials close to that. And it came out that the secret website that he had been spending time on, his team found out that he'd been on that website. His hidden thing that he thought wouldn't come out because of his reaction came out, Cinder, I saw over a seven to 10 minute period, that leader lose the right to lead. You could see it in the disgust, in the disappointment, in the furtive glances between his people up front. I thought, you know what? Character is what no one sees, but they see the reflection of it. And that solidified for me, yes, I do have the right to talk with people about character. It's not off limits. If you're not working on who you are, honesty, integrity, fairness, other-mindedness, integrity,

it's going to impact your leadership effectiveness. In fact, that workshop 15 years ago at this point was the thing that finally gave me permission to say it is right to talk about character. I was talking about competence, but you always kind of want to dance carefully around. Well, you don't have a right to tell me that. If you want to be a better leader, I do have the right to tell you that because I see what happens

when you're not bridging character. Well, thank you for telling that story. I could only imagine how difficult it was to be in that room and see all that happen. And then you're like leading, you're trying to make sense of all that's happening as a speaker. And I'm like, Whoa, what a powerful story. I appreciate what you said just in general

about what's in it for me that really like the people that you're leading care about what's in it for them. And so many times I've had meetings with like a leader. And then half the time, most of the time, they're talking about them. It it's like, I'm here to meet with you. And it's like, what I need from them is what's going to help me. We need to talk about us enough so that they know we're relatable. You and I chatted about my first book, The Golden Principles and Our Love of Dogs. And I noticed while you and I are talking, our newest rescue just popped up onto the daybed behind me. There's a natural affinity between people when they find common

ground. And part of what leaders need to do is build on that common ground. But then as you just said it so much, but then the common ground becomes them. It's not about you. Say enough for them to connect with you, but then ask, inquire, engage them. This is their story leader. Truth of the matter is, if you do a great job leading, at the end of the day, it's not about you. That's true. It's not about you. So you were talking about your golden retriever, and I love your keynote, the leader your dog thinks You Are. That's so sticky. And then you wrote a book called The Golden Principles, Life and Leadership Lessons from Your Rescue Dog, which Your Rescue Dog, Fredford, I didn't realize until recently that your book was honored by Amazon.com as the

top 100 best books of the year. Whoa. And so you have these 10 principles. And I know we don't have time to kind of dive into all of those 10. I'll make sure to put those 10 in the show notes, but which one or two do you feel like would be most helpful for people? And I, I just love this idea, Dr. Andy, because I, what I think about my dog, I have a Cavapoo and the other day I said to him, I wish parenting was as easy as taking care of your dog. Because he just loves on me, you know, and just is always my buddy, always excited when I'm home. Just like, you know, he's never in a bad mood, right? So tell us about these 10 principles. Well, first of all, I have to say you have a

Cavapoo. We just rescued a cattle dog. And while they're nothing like trying to raise a child from infancy to 21, cattle dogs are different than Cavapoos or in our experience, we've rescued, always been golden retrievers until Traveler, the one that's sitting behind me right now, showed up about three and a half months ago. A couple of principles, really in some respects, the foundational principle, the golden principle that I've spoken on all over the world, we learned from Redford. As you said, the dog that's on the cover of my book, Redford was horribly, horribly abused before we got him. He had been a breeding sire at a puppy mill. He was one of 65 dogs that were rescued by the sheriff's department and

distributed all over the country. I think he came from Arkansas. He ended up in Houston. We live in Austin. A couple of hours away, we were connected with the Houston Golden Retriever Rescue Group. And so we qualified to take one of these 65 dogs. Sandra, I got to tell you, you said loving on your dog is so easy and they're happy to see you. I'll bet if your dog could talk, they would say, what a great life I have. My wife and I have laughed for years. I don't know what heaven looks like, but it probably looks like our backyard for our dogs, right? I mean, it's the pool, it's the half acre, it's frequent trips to get puppy cups at Starbucks. I wish I had my dog's life, right?

Redford didn't get any of that. He cowered and he did and he urinated and he dug and he, and it was like, come on, bud, you cashed in your chips. You're not living in a cage anymore. You get, you got it, man. Wow. And yet it took months. It took months and months. And I think that really, as I started to find my voice around the very things we've

been talking about, I recognized influence and trust are closely tied together. You never get to influence somebody beyond the degree to which they trust you. So while we had given Redford the greatest life a dog could want, and as I said, at that point, we were living on a half acre with a swimming pool and just a great life with a doggy door and tile floor and beds and all of this stuff that we do for our dogs. But it didn't matter because Redford couldn't trust our love. It took time and then more time and then more time. And I just recognized as I was talking about leadership, I thought, you know what? This story about Redford is the story for all of us because just because I know I'm trustworthy doesn't mean he gets it. And trust takes time. Leaders, trust takes time. Your position might give you respect, but it doesn't give you influence.

That takes time. making deposits into emotional, logical, psychic, psychological, job-related deposit accounts for the team members that we're seeking to influence. I've got a relatively new manager that's on our team right now. She comes in with some great capabilities. So excited to have her on the team. She's not fully drinking the Kool-Aid of our core values yet. And some of the management decisions she's making are different than I might encourage her to make. It's just going to take her a while to really fully understand the Kool-Aid of our company and to live in that. Trust takes time. That was the golden principle. That was the keynote speech I was delivering at a conference where a small boutique publisher was in the back of the room.

And he said, you got any other dog stories? You know what? I think I've learned more about leadership from my dogs than I have from my dissertation studies, than I have from my interviews, my research. You know, the other one that comes to mind is the doggy play bout where they get down and they kind of stretch their paws out in front of them and they put their head down and their tail up. There is a principal leader about getting down to their level. Leaders don't come in from above if they're really effective. They're Jesus kneeling down in the dust, drawing symbols while he's got all of

the religious perfectionists around him waiting to hear him speak. How are you getting down to their level? So that probably would be a couple of my favorite ones. Trust takes time and you got to get down to their level. Awesome. And those were the top two. It doesn't matter how much you love someone, it takes time for your love to be level. And those were the top two. It doesn't matter how much you love someone. It takes time for your love to be trusted. And then if you really want to reach someone, you have to get down to their level. Well, you got to tell us, what did you do for Redford to finally feel like he was safe in your space?

Because I think there's so many leadership lessons on that too, like this idea of psychological safety. And if you are coming in, even your manager that isn't leading exactly the way that you want, if you go in and create more fear and anxiety for that person, they can't be their best. So what'd you tell us about Redford and what happened? Well, we had to change. And there's another leadership principle right there. If a leader is going to lead effectively, they've got to be the agile one. So for instance, very practically, very practically,

Cinder, you and I have lived on the road for a number of years and I typically am catching the last flight out and getting home after midnight. And of course, when I get home after midnight, I think everybody should be glad to see me, right? Because another day on the road, another dollar in the bank account, I'm keeping the creditors at bay. And so for years, my tradition was I'd get home at 1130 or 1230 or one o'clock and I'd walk in the door and I'd drop my suitcase and my backpack or briefcase and say, I'm home, expecting the family to come and greet me. And when a big man drops loud luggage and yells out into the house, it said Redford the other way. And part of what I had to learn was I got to come in a little less strong. I've got to change my behavior to meet

him where he's at. And so I think my family appreciated Redford as well because they grudgingly got up to greet me and say, hi, daddy, we're glad you're home. We love you. But I think they probably enjoyed sleeping when I came home quietly as well. That's awesome. And really, that's just one example. But recognizing that leaders need to be the ones that lead with agility. I think that's the point, right? 1950s, it might've worked for you and me to say, because I said so in the 2020s, that that doesn't work. In fact, I saw something on the internet recently

that said young employees are gonna quit before they have a hard conversation with their boss. They do not want this type of confrontation. Well, if we're gonna keep staff, that means we've got to work even harder at coming alongside them instead of coming down on them. Oh, you're asking me some good questions. Wonderful. I feel like I'm just up on my soapbox.

Sorry, I'm talking so much. You are not up on your soapbox. I can see that you're passionate about it. And I think this is all great, incredible content and really great for people who are listening and thinking about, okay, how can I keep growing and growing in my leadership? So Dr. Andy, where can we find out about your book, The Golden Principles, your speaking, and just tell us about how we might be able to find more information about the Neely group? Well, neelyleadership.com is the website, neelyleadership.com. The other thing is

I've got a simple little ebook, Cindra, The Three Imperative Leadership Conversations, how to have a hard conversation, how to hold a coaching conversation, how to hold a threefold affirmation conversation. And if they simply go to leadershipmaterials.com, they can sign up for that ebook, Leadership Materials. As a fellow leadership junkie, Senator, my webmaster couldn't believe two years ago, there are no good leadership websites left. And I said, no, Austin, I found leadershipmaterials.com. He said, buy it. And so- Yeah, that's a great website. Yeah, leadershipmaterials.com. And that'll get them an opportunity to download this eight-page e-book with templates and planners and worksheets on how to hold a hard conversation because managers get the easy conversations, leaders get the hard conversations. How to hold a coaching conversation, how are you developing your people to consistent?

I've got a 30-minute once-a a month coaching model that I taught folks all over the world. And then how do we make those deposits? And I've got a very simple threefold affirmation conversation where one win can turn into three wins and you can help your team members celebrate three times with one win. So yeah, Neely Leadership. Awesome. Leadershipmaterials.com. Oh, I've enjoyed our conversation together. Yeah. So much fun. We knew we were going to have fun. And so here's what I took from you today. I loved your four leadership necessities, competence, character, conviction, and covenant. We talked about fail fast and fix. Love that. Confident uncertainty. How can you measure fear carefully? We are talking about

your risk tolerance as a business owner and entrepreneur. Yes, there are two sides of the same story. Same sides of the same story. And then we are talking about how are you growing as a leader? How are you becoming a better person? And you need that to continue to become a high-performing leader. And at the end, we were talking about the W's and the D's and people really just helping us grow as the W, who we are, how we're showing up. Love today. Thank you so much, Dr. Andy. Any final advice or comments that you'd have for people? No, it's just been a pleasure being with you. You and I got connected a number of months ago, and I felt like I found a fellow journeyer on this process. I guess the last thing I'd say is most of my work is with organizational development. I work with teams of managers,

C-suite people, everything you and I've talked about today, it's personal development stuff as well. This, you know, what works at work works at home. This plays at making you a better person. And I know that's an area of real passion for you as well. Thanks for the- Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Andy. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A dot com. See you next week.