The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – C-Suite and Beyond: The 4 Keys To Leadership Success by Tom Kereszti

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

C-Suite and Beyond: The 4 Keys To Leadership Success by Tom Kereszti https://amzn.to/44iVkcT What is your roadmap to success? As someone who has lived and worked in several different countries, Tom Kereszti shares how to lead a business based on Christian principles in this guide. He focuses on four keys: who you are, your vision, is your strategy a growth strategy, and the members of your team. He also highlights a bonus principle: connecting with others. The book is filled with stories of leaders who have successfully led teams, inspirational quotes, Biblical lessons, and companies who have gotten it right. If you are a C-Level executive or just aspiring to be one, this book will empower you to become a better leader. Find a Christian-based path that leads to personal and business success with the lessons, insights, and examples in C Suite and Beyond.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by the show and being part of it. As always, the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you,

at least not as harshly as that scale you step on in the morning. We all have been there. You know what I mean. Or it's the mirror, but don't get me started on that. Thanks for tuning in. As always, we have the most amazing guests. We have an amazing mind on the show. We're talking about one of my favorite topics, leadership.

You may have heard of it. I like leadership. Leadership's kind of cool. Changes your paradigm in the world. And so we're talking about that, the C-suite, how to be successful in the C-suite. Probably going to be successful in your life because leadership and vision pans into every aspect of your life. I mean, parents are leaders. You're probably a leader.

It's not about job title. You don't have to be a big CEO Elon Musk to be a leader. It's kind of funny how people do that. They're like, I'm not a leader, Chris. I'm just a manager. I work the front line. No, you can be a leader anywhere. You just have to take charge and lead.

So there you go. We'll be talking about the amazing insights of his amazing book, but in the meantime, that's our setup for the shaming and guilting. Please refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives, please. For the love of God, please do it. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, go to, uh, let's see itunes.com, uh, Fortes, Chris Foss, five-star review, but a good reads.com Fortes, Chris Foss, youtube.com Fortes, Chris Foss, linkedin.com Fortes, Chris Foss, subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter. And Hey, we it says Chris Voss. YouTube.com, for it says Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, for it says Chris Voss.

Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter. And hey, we're starting to get cool over there. We're getting traction on TikTok, some of the new AI systems we use to cut up the content. Go to Chris Voss 1 on TikTok and the Chris Voss Show podcast on TikTok. It's kind of cool what AI is doing, man. It's changing the world. He is the author of the amazing book uh that has been on amazon since november 3rd 2020 the book is entitled c-suite and beyond the four keys to leadership

success tom kretzky or kretzky uh is joining us on the show. Did I get that right, Tom? Perfect. There you go. He is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about his amazing book, and we're going to learn a lot about some of the stories he's collected and things that have gone into it. And I think you're going to be impressed. I'm impressed. I think you will be too.

And if not, well, you know, you can call the show and ask for your money back. Wait, this show is free. What do you want from me, people? Two to three shows a day? Tom is an industry influencer who adds value to individuals and helps companies reach their highest potential through life-changing leadership principles. Tom is a highly sought-after coach, mentor, and speaker. His approach to leadership comes from a lifetime of international experience.

He has built and led executive teams at Colgate, Palmolive. That reminds me, I need to order some Florida toothpaste. Phillips Electronics, Reckitt Benkisser. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right. Benkisser. There you go. And the Strauss Group in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States.

He's been so international, I can't pronounce half the companies he's been with, damn it. So unlike many leadership experts who have not had the privilege of being in leadership, he's lived his life as a leader and created the challenges that most people face in life. And welcome to the show, Tom. How are you? Living the dream. Thank you so much for having me. Living the dream there.

There you go. Give us a.com. Where can people find you on the interwebs, get to know you better? I have a curse and a blessing of a last name that you had trouble pronouncing. So if you Google Karesti, you'll find my sister, myself, and my two daughters. So it's easy to find me. You can find me on LinkedIn myself, and my two daughters. So it's easy to find me. You can find me on LinkedIn. That's my biggest following.

Or on Amazon, just Kereszti, K-E-R-E-S-T-I. ZTI. And there'll be a link on the Chris Voss Show. So, Tom, you've done lots of travels throughout your life. What motivated you on to write this book? So I have to give my wife credit, right? your life. What motivated you on to write this book? So I have to give my wife credit, right? We went

internationally in 91 as an expat and lived in six different countries and many continents and my wife is very outspoken. She loves sitting at dinner tables at parties and she'll dominate about 70% of the discussion always.

This is how she got you to write the book, too, huh? She cracked the whip and said, write a book. She was always sharing these stories with everybody, dominating discussion. And somebody said, you know, Kathy, you should write a book. And then I said, okay, well, maybe I should write the book and looked at it and said, okay, why would somebody read all these stories and put a framework around it? And what I quickly found was when my life was working well and our life was working well, some things were evident and when things weren't going so well, some things were missing. And it boils down to those four keys to leadership success. And I wrote a couple of chapters, sent it off to about 10 friends, 15 friends. And they all came back and said, Tom, we love the stories.

Your writing sucks, but we love the stories. So that's not a problem. And the book was born. There you go. Well, that's what editor is for. You have the editors fix the writing and stuff. That's what I did. So let's get into the 30,000-hour review of the book.

I teased it out a little bit, but let's hear from you. A 30,000-hour review, what's inside the book? Well, look, one of the reasons we wrote the book is people hate their jobs. I mean, if you take some polling out there, probably about 70%, 80% of the people hate their bosses. And it's not really they hate their jobs. They just hate their bosses. About 20% of the people actually like their bosses.

I look at my own career through that 30 years or 35-year ride through corporate America. There's literally three guys that are highly respected and would go through a wall for it. Everybody else was like, why am I working for this person? My God. So, and we spend, I think, I don't know if it's a US number or national or global number, but it's about $50 billion corporations spend on leadership training. And we're just really bad at it because most companies take a person who's very good at a skillset, promote them into a leadership position, and they don't really invest in them

or train them how to become better leaders, and they just fail. So really, that's behind the book. It's really looking at myself and looking at other leaders to say, okay, what separates them? What makes them different? And why are they successful as leaders?

And it's not so much, I mean, you know, my career, I went from technology to finance to sales and marketing to general management and kind of rose up through that rank and ladder. And it was never because of my skill sets. There were a lot better accountants than me. There were a lot better engineers than me, a lot better marketers than me. But few people were better leaders than me and really kind of honed in on that leadership skill set.

There you go. Now, you've worked for a lot of big corporations through the years. Tell us kind of your hero's journey, your story of your life, and what got you learning leadership and mastering a lot of these skills you put in your book. Look, life. Life happened. A series of doors opened, a series of doors closed. And you kind of just, you know through you know sometimes

through prayer sometimes for other stuff you kind of just look at the door and say should i go through it should i not go through it uh there is no substitution for hard work right i mean you can be lazy and and get ahead but um you know it's also a lot of it you hear a lot of uh people become influencers on that right my daughter's an influencer an influencer. She's got, I don't know, 20,000 followers on Instagram. You know, I've got 15,000 on LinkedIn, so I don't know. But look, we're all influencers. Everybody's an influencer. You know, people, if you're a sales guy,

you're trying to influence the customer to buy your product. If you're a customer, you're trying to influence the sales guy to give you better terms. But everybody is in the influence business right and these four keys help you become better influencers so as i went through life as i went through the corporate you know ladder and and you know applying the corporate food chain it's really the old saying is it's who you know not what you know but it's it's really influencing, enhancing what I call your circle of influence. So more people know about you.

You build your own brand. One of the lessons that I learned about halfway through my career is I'm a brand. I look at myself as a brand. I promote myself as a brand. I'm not just an individual. I stand for something. And that's how you grow your influence and and that's how you climb the corporate ladder and hopefully you don't burn too many bridges and piss people off

there you go you know everyone's a brand nowadays like like you mentioned on social media they're an influencer you build your brand you know you get as a speaker as an author uh you know there's always a food chain that you've got to try and get up your brand, raise so that you can get some visualization and all that good stuff. You talk in the book about four keys to leadership success. Can you tease some of that out? Yeah. And again, the four keys help you influence others. The first one is pretty simple.

It's your character. Who are you as an individual if you want to be a leader you have to have a very strong sense of who you are and people have to see that and understand that you know for the folly I mean if you don't know who you are and people don't know who you are they're not going to buy into you you're not going to be able to you know become a leader so who you are essential. And the equivalent of that for a company is company culture. We talk about and we spend a lot of money on company cultures. And there's two types of companies. Every company has a culture. Some companies have a culture which just happens by

natural growth because they don't pay attention to it. And the cultures are just born. You may have multiple cultures, depending if it's a larger company with different departments, or you have companies who actually pay attention to it and they're mindful of it. They develop it, they nurture it, and the culture grows. They act it, they live it. And those are the healthy cultures, right? But all companies have a culture.

It's just, you know, I always tell people, you might as well think about it and put some you know put some effort behind it to get it the way you want it because it's going to happen anyway let me ask you this let me ask you this on that concept because culture is a big thing for me and i realized a long time ago and i pre-read a lot of books before i started building companies and I understood that laying down a foundation of culture in the beginning is so important. And the leader sets the tone for that. Do you find that most people that don't try and control, you know, try and control is not the right word, but seed maybe, or build or lay a foundation to cultivate a good, healthy culture, if they don't do that, a lot of times the culture ends up a little bit toxic or maybe not quite as good as it might be. What do you think about that?

I agree 100%. Culture is not something that you put on a billboard. Culture is not something that's on your website. I say in a healthy environment in a healthy culture it's based on values it's based on shared values and the janitor of a company or an engineer in a company uh should be able to walk up to the ceo and say you know tom what you did doesn't doesn't line up with our values it's just you know, Tom, what you did doesn't line up with our values. It's just, you know, I don't understand. How can we have a culture and do what you just did?

It makes no sense. And in many companies, majority of the companies, you know, the people who are ahead of the companies are just too full of themselves. They can't take that feedback. And they should be able to take that feedback because you know they're they're the head of the fish they're you know if they they're not living a culture how could they possibly expect everybody else in the organization to live the culture there's just a bunch of bullshit you make a great point the the fish rots from the head and i've seen many times you know

people one of my one of my pet peeves is people who run a high school popularity competition thing and so someone sits narcissistically at the top and wants everybody to pump them up and and you know they run their they don't run their system on merits people that work the hardest they run their system on who can kiss their ass the most and be popularity that's one management thing I hate. And the leader really sets the tone at the top. You know, you bring up a good point or someone actually, Matthew Fulton is calling on the show. Thanks, Matthew.

People want to connect to the person, not the company. And you were talking earlier about how even though you're in a company, you still have your brand inside that company. And let me flush it out and make sure I understand you correctly. So there's times I've gone to a place that I don't like. Like I'm not a big fan of Walmart's new self-forced self-checkouts. And I'm kind of a jerk and I go and ask for a checker

and which they, in my story, they, you know, they're, they're like gone, but I demand one. And I remember being pissed off about it. Cause I don't like it. I don't, you know, if you want to pay me to, why don't you just pay me to restock yourselves too, while you're, while I'm at it, uh, other than bagging my own groceries. But, uh, I, the guy came out, the cashier came out and he was friendly and he goes, how's your day going? He goes, uh, you know, the cashier came out and he was friendly and he goes, how's your day going? He goes, uh, you know, what's your hat about? It was, it was that about, and he was like really super nice to me.

And it made my experience totally flip from a very negative one to very positive one. And is that an example of a guy who's, is one of those people like Matthew's talking about where you can connect to a person who's a great brand inside of your company is going to help change a customer's perception of you. Well, you're only as strong as your weakest link. So, so that, that's a great example where you actually have an interface between a customer and an employee and it's, and it's a positive one.

And if that employee hasn't bought into the culture, doesn't like their job, I mean, everybody should be passionate and love going to work every day. They should love their job. If you're miserable, that comes right across your face, and it comes across in your interactions with other people, whether you're a clerk in a Walmart or a head sales guy or head purchasing guy. I mean, yeah, love what you do.

If you're not loving what you do, life is too short. Go find something else to do. There you go. And that's probably a good reason to hire people who love what they do. And there's probably a lot of experiences I could cite that, you know, I've had trouble with. I don't like a brand or I don't like the experience I'm having. And sometimes someone can jump in and you can tell they enjoy their job. They enjoy what they do.

You know, I've told people, even if you don't like what you do or maybe you don't find you're in the career or job that you do, do your best work. Work hard because it's a muscle that you build. Like, you know, I have a lot of people, I don't like working where I'm at and I want to go be an entrepreneur. I'm like, well, are you phoning it in where you work? Yeah. Well, it's a lot of work to be an entrepreneur. And when I work for other people that I didn't like, or, you know, toxic cultures, et cetera, et cetera, I did my best work. I just worked my hardest. I performed the best because in my mind, it was practice to be better at what I do. So you talk about, you talk about the four keys, who you are, your vision, your strategy as a growth strategy and the members of your team. So what's the growth strategy that you want to plan for in the C-suite?

How do you envision that and apply that? Well, look, everybody wants to be better than they were the day before. You know, if you're a company, you want to have more. Sorry, I had to get that. Yeah, well, you know, at a certain age, you may say, okay, maybe I'm more. Yeah well you know at a certain age you may say okay maybe i'm more yeah i'm just i'm at the fucking age um but you know that's that's the idea of life i want to be better tomorrow i mean i'd like to have five books out tomorrow instead of one um i want to be healthier tomorrow i want

to be more active tomorrow so i want to continue continue to grow. So a healthy strategy, I believe, is a growth strategy. Now, where people make a mistake is they skip aligning their strategy with their vision. And vision is extremely important. We kind of skipped over it. Every company, every individual should have a very simple vision statement for their life. One for my life is man of God, leader of men. So anytime I have to make any major decisions, I run it against that. It doesn't honor God and is a leadership role.

If it doesn't, I don't do it. If it does, then I probably do it. So what you want to do, and healthy vision statements are really simple. You take two athletic companies nike we unleash human potential puma is we're the fastest brand on earth very different statements both very successful companies right um so make sure you have a clear vision statement that people can buy into people can understand it i love coca-cola we refresh the world anybody who's associated with coca-cCola knows it's about refreshment

and it's about global distribution. So it's easy to buy into. It's easy to understand. So once you have that vision statement, then what you do is you build a strategy to continue to support and move along that line for that vision statement. And where companies and people get in trouble is they build a strategy and they get distracted by the latest shiny know shiny object oh competition is doing this the money yeah whatever my name is doing this and

so you kind of get veered off and uh and one of the companies that i i use an example is kodak i mean if you look at kodak back in my colgate days right colgate and kodak did this great joint promotion uh to send the picture of your biggest smile. They did a global promotion where Kodak people were taking pictures of people's smiles for Colgate, for your teeth, and Kodak film. And Kodak, their mission statement or vision statement was to be the best imaging company in the world. And they just kind of lost that whole area of what their vision was. And they thought they were a filmmaking manufacturing company. I mean, with today's technology, they just stuck to their vision to be the best imaging company in the world where they could be. And they're just a formal fraction of themselves because they got distracted by their latest shiny object doing stupid things.

You know. American Can became an insurance company or something like that and they went out of business. Stick to your vision. Don't change that every year. Let me ask you this. As a personal brand, do I need to have a vision or byline

or motto? Maybe I should make one Chris Voss, sexiest man in the world, and I just put that on a shirt and wear it around the office. I'm just being funny. Maybe as a personal branch, you have a motto. I think ours is the Chris Voss show,

the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. I don't know, maybe. You should. Because, like I said, any time you come at a crossroads on doing that, it could be a big one. It could be one of the things that happened to me way back when, and my wife knows this, so it's no surprise to her,

but I was a CEO of a large company, and we were doing an off-site meeting in I think it was Romania somewhere. So, you know, we had a great event and after the event, I got invited out for some of the folks to one of the local clubs and we're dancing and having, you know, having a great time and headed back to the hotel and, you know, the hotel lobby, this one of the brand managers was kind of looking at me with puppy eyes. And, you know, I could have done two things there, right? I could have kind of gone with the invitation or kind of run it against my vision statement and say,

OK, if I'm a leader of men and a man of God, how is that honoring my family, even though I'm thousands of miles away? And if I wake up in the morning, you know, how do I face my management team or my leadership team? Am I really a leader, you know, taking that choice? So even little decisions like that, you run it against your vision statement and helps you, you know, it gives you clarity and gives you a really, it gives you a really quick answer of what you should do and what you shouldn't do.

And the book is filled with stories of leaders who've successfully led teams, inspirational quotes, lessons, and companies that got it right. You want to tease out any of the stories that you have packed in the book? Or a short synopsis. I don't want to make you read a chapter. There's a million stories. No, no. I mean, I'll use my wife again. I mean, one of the great stories I love in the beginning of this book is everybody sort of says, look, I'll become an influencer.

I'll become a leader when I have the budgets, when I have the corner office, when I have the title. And I would encourage all your listeners to say, look, no matter where you are in your life, you can take a leadership role and you said this yourself. And back in, most people remember where they were in 9-11. And in 9-11, we were living in London. We were just outside of the Heathrow Airport. And 9-11 happens and Kathy's watching Sky News and she's kind of distraught because, you know, what's happening and she sees all these people stranded at Heathrow Airport out for her so she she feels compelled to help she's not in new york we had a lot of friends in the fire department four guys that we lost that we knew closely and uh

kathy said look i got to do something i don't know what it is she got in a car she went out to terminal four which was the international terminal at that time and um just said how can i help and and people were like well you know, all the hotel rooms are booked. So we're sleeping on the floors and you know, teeth was one of the most expensive airports and some people were out of money. They couldn't afford to eat. And, you know, you can see British here getting on national TV and say, look, it's an act of war, we're not responsible.

Everybody's on their own. So light goes on in Kathy's sense. She said, look, you know, we're exp're not responsible. Everybody's on their own. So, light goes on and Kathy said, she said, look, you know, we're expats, right? Everybody's got big houses with plenty of room, plenty of refrigerators full of food and stuff. She said, well, why don't we host these people? So, she got on the phone tree with the other, you know, spouses that are part of the Nishanl community and say, hey, can you host, can you host, can you host? Um, before, you know, you've got the school bus out of the airport and we're taking people back

to the school parking lot and folks are taking them home and hosting them. And then the next day, uh, there was four international schools in London. So four schools are on board now. So you got four times as many houses. You got four times as many families to host. Right.

So, and you can read about this. You'll, you'll Google on the internet. You'll Google it on the internet. You'll find it, right? And then imagine this, 9-11. The second day after 9-11, British Air walks up to my wife and says, hey, we love what you're doing. And naturally loved it because she was like a light and shining armor. Everybody was bitching at British Air people.

And she's easing all that tension. So she said, here's a badge for you whatever you need just come in you know so they gave her an on-air british air badge and turned 9 11 during the biggest security crisis to go you know cut lunch you know we'll help you with anything you want um the third day her phone rings and uh she's been in terminal four so you know mostly british air so phone rings third day. It's Virgin Atlantic. Hey, you know, is this Kathy Asher? She goes, well, we got a flight going to the U.S.

It's got 80 seats on it. If you want to send 80 people to the airport, they got, you know, rights back home. So you can see that influence growing. And look, the moral of the story is if it was about budgets, if it was about the corner office, I was the guy. I was CEO of a large company. I could have put money towards it. I could have put, but it wasn't about that. It was just finding a cause and stepping in and taking a leadership role to say, look, this is a good cause.

Let's rally around it and let's build a team around it. And look, after the problem was gone, the team was gone. I mean, the team was disturbed. So, you know, that's also a lesson for companies is that when crisis happened, when things happened, it doesn't have to come from the top, right?

If you have the right culture, you can have people just organize inside an organization, maybe a temporary team, a leader steps up and say, we've got a problem. Let's solve this problem. There you go. And he could be an individual like a guy in Walmart. You've got a problem. Yeah.

He fixes it for the customer and makes them happy. Yeah. Yeah. We see this a lot in the military too. The military, for the U.S. military I should specify, has a really great thing where they teach everyone to lead. And so if there's any point in the chain of command where there's a failure, your commander is missing, down, killed, in action, whatever the case may be,

everyone can still operate as take the lead and operate as a unit without having to wait for the Pentagon to send them. Is it okay if we cross the ravine? You know, that sort of thing. And it makes for a brilliant strategy for them. Let's tease out some of the things that you do. I'm looking at your website. You've got several services you offer. You've got workshops and leadership development, executive coaching, masterminds, keynote speaking, strategic consulting.

Tell us about some of the things you do there and how you interact and help people succeed. Well, mostly you come into a company and usually somebody has a problem. They invite you in because there's a problem. It may be a problem with lack of growth. It may be a problem with lack of growth. It may be a problem with people not getting along. It may be

kind of coming up with a new vision to where the company should be going. So they are struggling with a question. And then me and my team come in. And by the way, I have two other great guys, good friends. One is a Navy SEAL, retired Navy SEAL.

Oh, there you go. He's coming out. So I'll give him a plug as well. His name is Kyle. He's also published by HarperCollins like I am. What's the name of his book? What's the name of his book? He's overrated.

We've had him on the show. It's in the can. Yeah, I believe so. I think we've had him on the show. I believe in the can. Yeah, I believe so. I think we've had him on the show. I believe it's in the can. Yeah, we've had him on the show, and it's in the can until September 5th or August or something. Yeah, his book is coming out in a couple of days, yeah. Yeah.

So he's a good friend, and him, myself, and Chris, we're big preach preachers proponents of of uh self-led teams that are inside of organizations and that's exactly how the seals work you know yeah and once you read kyle's book you'll you'll understand that and so that's a great book as well um funny enough you know i started when what kyle came out with his book i started reading his book and i said kyle you know we come from two different, but we look at the world very same. The way I look at empowering people and making them successful and the way you look at it, we got there from two different places, but we got to the same place. There you go. Yeah, we've got that in the can.

We've just been holding it for the release date, August 29th. Leadership is already there. And we had a great discussion. We talked about of the military stuff that we you and i talked about uh there's some other cool things that you offer on your website a virtual workshop under the product area and 16 laws of communication virtual mastermind tell us about that and how you can help people succeed with those things you're doing well i'm also, I don't know if you've heard of John Maxwell, but John Maxwell has been around for, you know, he's in his 80s now. And he has a team, and I met John back in 2005,

and he's been my mentor since. Yeah. I joined this team back in early 2000, I think 13 or 14. So I license all his products. Oh, wow. So I can use my own materials or I can use John Maxwell's materials to really help address

whatever that C-suite whatever the C-suite leader is is really struggling with and look the fact is I try to market the C-suite leaders of companies between 20 and 300 million. Why 20 to 300 million?

Well, if their revenue is less than 20 million, they're probably not really thinking about things like culture and vision and strategic growth because they're trying to pay the bills and everything. They're just trying to do entrepreneurs, trying to get started. So if under 20 million, they probably don't need, they don't think they need me. They probably do need me, but they don't think they need me.

And then if it's over 300 million, they probably go to the Deloitte Tushas of the world, the Boston Consultants. They don't go to the Tom Karestis of the world. So that's the sweet spot between 20 and 300 million. I work with sweet, you know, sweet,

sweet, sweet leaders, you know, senior leaders. And, you know, the first thing like alcoholics and amnestics, you know, in order for you to get help, you've got to recognize you've got a problem. There you go.

So sometimes it's a tough call because maybe somebody in your organization wants to get my and recruit my help. So we have to softly approach that leader to say, look, there is a problem and you could use some help. There you go. And there's always, you always need to improve. You always need help. There's always, you know, I learned a long time ago with my companies, you know, I used to innovate a lot and do all this stuff. And then I kind of, you know, it got harder as the companies got bigger.

And I learned that I'm not the arbitrator of the corner of all the great ideas in the world. I learned that very quickly. And sometimes my employees or sometimes customers or, you know, there's, there's all sorts of different ideas and concepts and people that, of course, have learned to do it better when you approach some of these things. And as an entrepreneur, you're coming up and you're, you know, a lot of stuff you learn on the fly. And so having a second mind or having a mindset where you're like, hey, let's constantly be improving as we've talked about in the show is really important because if you're not constantly challenging yourself and improving yourself, well, you can get stuck in a lot of feedback loops

where you BS yourself and you're just listening to your stuff. Tell us about the Mastermind group. Well, there's two different ways to solve a problem one is called the workshop one is called the mastermind and the definition between the two for me is is a mastermind is getting a bunch of people together around a table you're not really looking for a specific outcome you basically say look here's here's a here's a an issue maybe a global issue maybe a global issue, maybe a company issue. It's a topic. You have a facilitator.

And people are on the roundtable, talk about it, and contribute, share their stories, and learn from each other. But there's really no desired specific outcome. With a workshop, there's a desired specific outcome to say, look, we've got a problem we've got to solve. So let's put a workshop around it. And it may be, like I said, the team's not functioning well. Maybe it's a toxic culture. Maybe the company doesn't have vision.

So it could be a myriad of things. And then you build a workshop around that to try to solve that specific problem with a desired outcome. So that's how I separate masterminds from workshops. There you go. What do you find most people are struggling with nowadays? Is it lack of good quality leadership? Is it lack of a

good culture what do you think is the number one problem would you say i think the number one problem is is not good leadership and the reason uh there's two reasons why there's not good leadership um one is a lot of companies like i mentioned to you promote uh people who are very good at something so one of the companies you mentioned was record Bank keys well record Bank keys are they had a habit of promoting um very good marketeers because they were a very good consumer goods company very highly marketer and did and they would imply they would appoint general managers for who are very good marketeers now they also appointed me as a general manager and I knew marketing, but I was

not one of the best marketing guys on the block. But I took a company that was about 40 million and made it about 68 million and they were losing about 2 million and then by the time I left two and a half years later, they were making 4 million. But my approach to it was really empowering the people and enabling the people to become successful and for the company to be successful. I didn't come down and say, OK, this is the marketing things we should do, which is some of some of my colleagues. And they kind of looked at that company and said, well, we really don't understand what's going on, but we sure like the results. There you go.

Right? And one of the nicest things that I heard is when I was moving on two and a half years later to something bigger and better, they had a go-ahead party for me. And my CFO said, Tom, we just want to thank you for believing in us and making us believe in ourselves. And that was the nicest compliment I could ever ask for. And that's what it boils down to. You create a healthy environment as a servant leader for people to be successful. It's not about leadership, about me calling the shots and is the highway

or my way. And unfortunately, a lot of leaders are so absorbed in themselves, and by at least so, because they went through the corporate ladder, they got many promotions, they were successful. So they really think it's all about them. And the second that you recognize that it's not about you, but it's about something much bigger than you, that's the first step for becoming a better leader. There you go. Always improving. And then I guess we've got a last plug in here. You have, you're going to be a live to lead after a leadership development experience. So you want to get a plug in for that?

Lift to lead. It's yeah. If you're in San Diego, stop by. We have limited seating. You could also watch it online. So if you just go to my website, pull down the lift to lead tab.

It's again, it's associated with the john maxwell organization this is something they do every year uh they have four great keynotes this year every year they have some great keynotes yeah and you'll learn how to become a better leader so whether you watch it online or you come join us as a person in san diego we'd love to have you there you go should be fun well uh people are going to learn a lot from your book and your experience and everything you've done in life uh give us your dot com one more time so if you can find you on the interims please uh you got to the same place uh either my last name which is

kereszti k-e-r-e-s-z-t-i.com and you can just find me on linkedin you can find me on amazon and it'll get you to leadershipdisciples.com, which is the host site. There you go. Tom, it's been wonderful and insightful to have you on the show, inspiring, and hopefully we get some people to reach out and contact you and get to know you better. What's the best way to do that so people can get involved in what you do? I would say the easiest is LinkedIn. Just approach you there, send you a message and interact with you. There you go.

Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn is such a wonderful place. Tom, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in.

We appreciate you as well. We appreciate all of you. Well, except for that one guy in the back. I don't know. The guy with the blue shirt there in the back. Wait, I'm wearing a blue shirt. Anyway. I don't know. The guy with the blue shirt there in the back. Wait, I'm wearing a blue shirt. Anyway, I don't know what any of that means, but it sounded funny at the time in my head. Go to goodreads.com for it says Chris Foss.

YouTube.com for it says Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com for it says Chris Foss. And Chris Foss won on TikTok. We finally found an AI to cut up our content, put in really cool little pieces with all the stuff. So go over there and support the show. We certainly appreciate you guys. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. There you go. Off we go, Tom. Great show, man.