if you show up and you're trying to sell to an organization you haven't

bothered to read their look at their website and understand what their

mission is and their values and their vision, you're wasting my time.

I would've vendors come to me and they didn't bother looking at my website.

It's like, well, you'd know our strategic priorities for the last

eight years are on my website.

you didn't even bother looking at it, you're wasting time.

What if Navigating Change didn't have to feel like chaos, but

could actually be a calling?

This week on Seek, go create the leadership journey.

I'm joined by Brad Engler, author, advisor, and former Chief

Information Officer at the University of Texas at Austin Big School.

With decades of leadership experience at both Accenture and in higher education,

Brad shares hard-earned wisdom on leading large scale transformation,

aligning it with mission and how Faith quietly informed his professional path.

His new books, fears of Influence is a blueprint for anyone called

to lead with clarity and purpose and complex environments.

If you're a leader facing change, uncertainty, or high stakes decision

making, conversation is for you.

Brad, welcome to Seat Go Create.

Thanks for inviting me.

Great to have you here, man.

You got so many exciting things on your resume and within your book,

but let's get started here and, why don't you pick, would you rather

answer do you do who are you?

Well, I am going to go with the Who are You?

Because it's really different than, the last 40 years of my career.

And, I retired from Accenture.

most partners retired 50, so I was ready to go.

And then two years later, the university called me and they wanted some help with

an IT strategy and hour week pro bono.

So they didn't even pay me until three months later.

And then I was halftime six months later, full-time, and

I was there for seven years.

IT Chief Information Officer.

But now, after I retired the second time, I really wanted to help

people, grow in their careers.

I enjoyed that.

Through my 40 years.

It was part of the culture at Accenture was to grow your people.

And I actually look back at 22 years of annual reviews and I looked at how

my partners helped me become a partner.

And yeah, they did a really good job giving me stretch

roles and things like that.

So I had all these stories and I thought, and I'm still mentoring two or

three people a year, but you know, that doesn't scale and I can't clone myself.

And so I thought, well, I'll just write a book.

And so I got together with my publisher and the editor was terrific.

She says, just inventory all your stories.

And I came up with like 40 to 50 stories and then we just sent it a whiteboard

and looked at how can we organize these They fell into relationships,

business relationships, and there was boss, direct reports, executive

leaders, all your staff, and those are your relationship closest to you.

And then there was customers, peers, and influencers and strategic vendor partners.

And the stories just fell into those categories.

And, she was really good.

She says, don't write one page until you have the full outline.

Well, you don't build a house without a blueprint.

You don't, write a program without a design.

Yeah.

and I, since the book has come out, I've created a couple of workshops.

just did one this week, a one hour workshop.

And there are a lot of young people there who are early in their career,

and I just wanted to help them.

Learn the secret of the importance of investing in relationships.

And, you know, people talk about networking all the time and you know, to

me it's superficial and transactional.

in 40 years I've never been to a networking event where I got a

customer out of it, and I had one fellow, I had his business card.

a week later he is calling to ask me to donate to his not-for-profit.

So I don't even know who you are.

That would be a no.

a lot of people who are my vintage are giving it to their adult

children so they can, 'cause they don't teach this in business school.

and so I've just, really enjoyed, helping people grow.

is this kind of a mission for you now at this stage of your life?

Yeah.

it really is.

I've been successful.

I've been fortunate, very fortunate to have really good mentors over the

years, and it's a way to pay it forward.

Hmm.

That's good.

so what's interesting is that sometimes relationship people

aren't considered technical.

And technical people aren't considered

Mm. Mm-hmm.

tell me, it seems as if I'm sitting here talking to a guy that CIO,

technical background, whatever.

And we're gonna go over a little bit of background in just a moment.

'cause I got some questions from kind of way back.

But I mean, are you a relationship guy or a technical guy or both?

Or where do you lean?

Well, probably lean more on the relationship side.

I had to learn enough of the technology so I could translate

to my customers or my executives.

I did a lot of, translation at the university.

they're brilliant PhDs, who are deans and presidents and,

but they don't know technology.

And so I try to use simple words to convey, some complex, terms.

But I had to learn how to program.

I had to learn how to design programs.

I had to learn how to manage programmers and designers.

And the technology changes over the years, but the principles are really the same.

for those that might be listening in, y'all heard him say 40 years

in, business, and the audience knows I'm in my early sixties.

I'm guessing you're in your sixties.

is that accurate?

I will be, 70 in June.

Congratulations.

So that's coming up.

That actually might be right around the time this releases, so it we'll

Excellent.

a birthday celebration for you.

Excellent.

so one of the things that, I had a conversation recently with some clients

that I'm working with, and we were talking about some generational differences

that we're noticing in the workplace.

Mm-hmm.

and some of it is related to communications styles and some

of it is related to work ethic.

Some of it was related to making, both of us, or we were quick decision makers

and we were noticing some passivity and younger generations we were dealing with.

You mentioned that you've got people you interact with that are

giving book to their adult children.

Mm-hmm.

Talk about just some generational stuff.

Some of these things, I mean, I'm reading through and I'm going Yeah, that's right.

But some of this stuff could be new for people.

They've never heard it.

So just let's start having conversations around the generational

differences in some of these items.

Well, certainly at the university I had 330 people in my organization and

all the way from student workers to, people who were ready to retire and

been at the university for 40 years.

So I had to deal with all levels, and I found that there really.

Three principles that I tried to follow in all those relationships,

including my students, which was understand their goals and aspirations.

what's your major?

What do you wanna do?

And, what kind of work do you want to do?

I would have interns working for me who I would help them get an internship

somewhere aligned with their work.

Second is setting and managing expectations.

I was bad at it early in my career.

I got much better at it later in my career.

But, two phrases came up in the book.

One is, if you're a manager, people are not mind readers,

so you need to use your words.

And then the other phrase is, if you're a direct report and you need something from

the manager, you need to use your words.

And so I tried to be very clear on when I asked someone

to do something that I would.

Discuss, you know, when does it need to be done?

You know, what's reasonable, what does it look like?

And not just quickly, say, oh, go do this and have them flounder.

And then the third principle is genuinely caring about their success.

I would spend time walking the halls, I call it management, by stumbling around.

And, I would talk to people, I would walk through the help desk area where

all the students are, you can be very popular when you bring a bunch of

donuts to the, help desk area or pizza.

they're always starving.

just to get to know, what are people trying to achieve?

I had someone who, a direct report, I said, do you wanna be a CIO someday

or you wanna be a technical person?

they said, well, I really enjoy the technical work.

I said, well, great, we need you.

And then another, woman wanted to be a CIO.

I said, well, when I go on vacation, I'm gonna put you in

charge and see how you like it.

So, just taking the time to ask people, what are they trying to achieve?

Who doesn't want to share that?

And then being good about if you can help 'em, help 'em.

And if not, sometimes you know someone who can help 'em.

So, you don't have to.

Help everybody.

I think in the book you said something to the effect, I may be

getting this wrong, but you something that communication is a duty.

Mm-hmm.

it's part of our duty to do that.

I'm not sure that everyone looks at that, and that could be something

that might be slightly generational, even though I notice that in a lot of

arenas, people aren't really proactive when it comes to communication.

How has your approach to communication changed over your career and maybe even,

especially during challenging seasons?

I actually think that challenging seasons is when we learn what we're made of.

Hmm.

how, just give maybe a, you mentioned that you were better at it later, so a few

Yeah,

let's go ahead and

I,

maybe when you weren't so good, because I think that helps the listener

because they're probably sitting here going, man, I'm not where Brad is.

yeah.

some of the challenges you've dealt with there?

Well, saying yes to everything,

you know?

Yeah, I, I, I was really bad about, canceling vacations and, working too

much and, you know, I loved what I did.

So part of it was self perpetuating, but I, when I was, a manager, I found a book

called Managing Expectations that was written by a psychologist who applied her

psychological insights to it world, and it could be at any organization really.

And one of her techniques was just say, whoa, not say no, just say whoa.

And literally the next day, my type A personality boss, she

calls me up at five o'clock.

I'm trying to leave to have dinner with my wife and.

and she, I need a white paper.

A white paper.

And, you know, it just sounded really urgent.

And I was scared, but I said, whoa.

And I said, when do you need this white paper?

Oh, let me check my calendar.

I need it in two weeks.

Okay, how many pages do you want this white paper to be?

three.

I was thinking 10.

do you have an example of a white paper?

Oh, yeah.

Ask David.

I did one for XYZ Corp 10 years ago.

Well, guess what?

I went home and had dinner with my wife.

Now before I learned to say, whoa, I would've called her canceled

dinner, upsetting her and me.

I would have stayed up all night, written a 10 page white paper, and

delivered it the next day and get yelled at, this is not what I want.

And it's like, lose, lose, lose.

And.

Just by being clear and taking, creating some mental space and

time to really understand you.

You say you're a quick decision maker.

I actually, people like my management style 'cause I'm more of a plotter.

And so they'd come in with these, problems and they wanted to rush to

the solution and I said, well, it took us 40 years to get this way.

Let's understand what the problem is.

one of my techniques was intentional foot dragging where

I didn't rush to the decision.

and I would drag my feet.

I had a boss who.

Didn't want me to buy bottled water for my staff.

Now we were in buildings that were built in 1930s and forties, lead pipes.

I had one building where there was sediment in the glass

when, my staff would do it.

So I wanted to buy their water.

it was not that expensive.

but he was a CFO and they're penny pinchers.

a peer of mine wouldn't buy water for his staff.

they wanted to drag me down to the lowest common denominator.

even cut the water in my office and the coffee.

So I brought my own water and coffee for seven years, but I basically

ignored the boss for years.

then the new boss shows up, he goes, what's his water thing?

And he stopped it.

I dragged my feet for seven years.

I wonder if actually when you mentioned that you're a professional

foot dragger, I almost saw that you might need to trademark that.

That actually could be a good, leadership or management approach

and, it is real interesting.

I often will move quickly I have to force myself to slow down.

Right.

the people, really for my spiritual walk.

Mm-hmm.

I interact with the Lord, and sometimes on prayer time, the Lord

says, would you just slow down

Yeah.

little

Mm-hmm.

I, but before we get too far into here,

Mm-hmm.

to back up 'cause I like to understand kind of how people, I

like to understand their journey.

Mm-hmm.

as you're sitting here for those, watching the video, I think over your

left shoulder, you've got some books on Australia and I read somewhere, I

think this was correct, that you were a high school teacher in Australia.

that's correct.

I was an exchange student in Australia, and I was there when I was, 17 years old.

And then after I graduated undergraduate, I went back to the same school

and taught for a year and a half.

And it was really fun because the students knew, I knew what they knew.

So even though I, as a yank,

day ahead of him

they knew where things were happening.

So, I've been back with the family probably every five years or so.

one year I was back, I said to my Australian mom, you know, I'm the

Chief Information Officer at the University of Texas at Austin.

She looked at me and said, I didn't think you're that smart.

I said, I wasn't when I was 17, but I went to college and

then I went to graduate school.

Wow.

so you went over there as an exchange student and then later you went back.

what part of Australia were you in?

just north of Sydney, about a hundred miles is a valley called the Hunter

River Valley, known for their red wines.

this was a rural town called Maitland, which is, a lot of agriculture.

It's all built up now.

I've been to that wine country.

Oh, awesome.

in Australia and New Zealand's reason I'm asking,

Nice.

had some friends and we went up to

I

wine country and I think we spent the night up there

Australia's a beautiful place.

What are some

Mm.

either, either from the cultural experience or the teaching experience

you learned during that season of your life that you've kind of taken

with you for the rest of your life?

Mm-hmm.

you got from that experience?

Well, I think that's where my desire to help people started.

It's as you're a teacher, you've got, I had, ninth grade all boys.

Well, how do you keep them from tearing the room apart?

And I was teaching science and then I had, you know, 11th grade girls

and boys, English and histories.

But the younger guys, I had to really engage them.

And, you know, I was teaching science and I remember one, guy came up to me at.

Lunch, you know, on the playground.

He goes, what's, what's gonna happen in science today?

And I said, I'm not gonna tell you you have to wait,

but just, you know, to see people grow and, you know, you have, there's a direct

correlation and how hard you work as a teacher to how well your students do.

And I could see that every day.

you mentioned in your principles earlier you talked about,

genuinely caring for people.

Hmm.

always had that?

Is it something that's developed over time?

I know you're, I know you've got a faith component to your

Hmm.

What, where, where has that come from?

Or has it just been a build or give, give some background on that.

So where do you think that came from?

Your genuine caring for other people?

my parents,

Hmm.

Tell me more.

you know, they were, really good about, looking out for people, in our church,

taking care of the people who didn't have what we had and kind of teaching

me early on to be more sensitive to the fact that, we were lucky.

Not everyone is that lucky, so, be sensitive to that.

Did you grow up, I guess in a church environment and

Yeah,

faith was always a foundation of your life.

yeah, yeah.

United Church of Christ.

And did I see from the Midwest.

I know you've spent, we'll talk about your role at University of Texas soon,

Mm-hmm.

I know you spent a lot of time in and around that Austin area.

You're still there, but I think I saw Midwest.

where are you originally from?

Where'd you grow up?

I grew up, outside of Chicago, a suburb, crystal Lake, Illinois.

it was a small town, probably 10,000 people.

now it's of course all built up.

And then my undergraduate school is shyer College, which is in

a, at the time, a small rural campus in Mount Carroll, Illinois.

And really, when I got to finish up my teaching in Australia, I knew I wanted

to go to graduate school, literally put a map of the US out on the kitchen table and

said, okay, I don't wanna be cold anymore.

So I'm going somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line.

been to Austin before I've been to Florida, and I thought, well,

Florida's a little too humid for me, so I'll go, I'll go to Austin,

and that's how I ended up here.

So you went to Austin.

Austin kind of became your home now.

at some point you moved into that, I'll call it the consulting role.

That's the Accenture.

It probably, was it Accenture when you started that?

'cause

Now it, I joined Arthur.

It was Arthur Anderson, which became Anderson Consulting,

which became Accenture.

When I started there were 40,000 consultants worldwide in Arthur Anderson.

Accenture now has 700,000 people

Wow.

just on.

point when I came outta Georgia Tech, there was the big seven firms,

Mm-hmm.

I'm pretty sure there's been some slicing and dicing.

And are there three now?

Four,

I think four

yeah.

So, Accenture, big, big operation.

started out there.

I don't want to dwell a lot on this.

I want to get to some of these fears of influence that we're, we're gonna

Hmm.

But what I really love to do is gather some pros and cons.

Things you really gathered from those years in that experience,

and maybe some things you left behind and didn't take with you.

So tell me a little bit about those Accenture years and

some of the things you got.

the good thing about being in that consulting role is you see,

I think you get a glimpse at a lot of different scenarios,

A lot of different scenarios and a lot of similar scenarios.

So my practice area was primarily, government and higher education,

and my clients were University of Illinois, Ohio State, Michigan,

Columbia, Vanderbilt, Cal State.

Texas a and m. So the big Publix, big privates, and some, most of those were

one or two year transformational projects.

So my years at Ohio State really prepared me for being at the University of Texas

in Austin as a CIO 'cause I was actually, they hired me to be the Ohio State

leader of the Transformation Project.

So I was, I was actually the client, which was really great.

'cause then I could tell the Accenture partner, I want Christie here on Monday.

And she'd go, oh, I, I can't do that.

I see the same report.

You see, I want Christie here on Monday.

and was able to assemble a dream team.

But I learned, you know, especially at the University of what it's like

on the customer side of the desk.

And, you know, I dealt with some vendors who, some were very transactional.

They didn't care about us.

the one vendor showed up once a year to get their check, which was

always 10% more than the prior year.

And these software we're using was the learning management system, which is

what 54,000 students use, 4,000 faculty.

It affects everybody.

Well, they thought we were too big and it cost too much to

transition to another solution.

Well, the trouble was the students hated the software.

It was a 1990s, look and feel.

And technically they were the customer.

Right?

I mean, this is something I think gets

that's right.

those environments is are people coming for education and it,

seems like, I remember when I was at Georgia Tech, I didn't really

feel like a customer very often,

Yeah, well,

but I was the customer sort of right.

yeah, absolutely.

when I got to the university, I met with this professor

who'd been there for 40 years.

he was an electrical engineer, kind of a crusty fellow.

I'd worked with them 15 years prior in a statewide network

project that was successful.

And I said, okay, gimme some advice.

He goes, get out of the office and tell people you give a damn.

And that was the best advice because I then would meet with my peers across

the university every four to six weeks and just check in always with an agenda.

And, um, my peers who were my peers, the vice president for public safety.

Well, it wasn't if something would go wrong, it's when it would go wrong.

And how do we work together to make sure we keep people safe?

the provost for curriculum, it's her and her office that helped

me select the new solution.

So when we took the solution to the president, he said, well, what

did the students and faculty think?

Well, they selected it, they unanimously endorsed this

decision and he said, let's do it.

Each of these projects took two years to implement.

'cause we're so big, it's like an aircraft carrier, you gotta

turn it miles from the, port.

And, we changed all the phones, 21,000 phones to voiceover ip.

We, changed out email systems.

We had custom built email system that was 18 years old.

We replaced it with UT branded Gmail,

Faculty and staff, box for file sharing.

So over eight years we've moved as much as we could to the

cloud, including HR payroll.

So in March, 2020, my successor increased the VPN increase, the zoom,

and 70,000 people went online to do teaching, learning, research and work

that

feel good about that.

That timeframe seems significant,

Yep.

But if I had stayed in my office, I wouldn't have known she was in pain

trying to change this intractable system and then got her support and her team

support to implement over two years.

And at the end of the two years, this email came.

Across it was to the president and she and I were copied on it.

It's like, oh, I'm gonna get fired.

And it was the most heartfelt warming email.

It was from all the department leads complimenting her team and

mine that we helped them over two years make the transition.

And because it was such a better product, it was a natural pull.

But they said something like, you know, this sounds like an

arcane IT project, but it wasn't.

This is the lifeblood of the university and they.

Thanked us for not only being helpful, but working with the vendor

to change things to make it better.

the vendor ended up selling to all the research one universities like

us, so they knew, it was important.

The senior vice president for sales would call me once a month

just to see how things were going.

My other vendor, when we finally fired them, never even saw it coming.

They were so clueless and we had a big celebration, invited the department

leads and my staff and her staff.

We have a bowling alley on campus, so we had bowling and pizza and actually had

a cake with a tombstone shape that had the rest in peace for the old product.

that's a good tale of two cities there.

It's the best of times and then kind of the worst of times

That's right.

Coming head to head.

you mentioned something at Accenture you work with, higher education,

but you also worked with government.

what are some things that you could share?

There might be things you can't, but what are some things that you could share about

the type work you did with government?

Because I've got a, there's, there's something that's been nagging

at me about government, things that I'm gonna follow up with.

But tell me a

Mm-hmm.

about what you did with government, entities.

probably what I enjoyed the most was helping them with strategic planning.

It's kind of a dirty little secret that people don't have a strategic

plan, and so often they would reach out and ask for our help to plan.

I had one, Agency, it was a retirement agency and the

executive director was retiring.

He wanted to leave it in good hands to the next executive director.

So we reviewed all, the agency, came up with recommendations and

then a plan for how to move forward.

And I thought, yeah, that's really good stewardship.

we had one university system, 15 campuses, 250,000 students.

We went to all the campuses and created an IT strategy.

And the number one priority was, the network.

The network in Texas, in West Texas.

They were swinging lanterns to get the network to work.

And the second priority was they wanted library materials.

Available through the network, a digital library.

This is in the nineties.

And third was distance education.

to the credit of the board.

They funded the network and then they funded the digital library.

So 15 years later, I met the University of Texas at Austin.

one of the things the faculty love was the digital library that we

had implemented 15 years prior.

Yeah, that's cool that, I guess the reason I was going there, but

it doesn't sound like you did a lot of work at the federal level.

you

Oh, no.

Tapered off, but part of this year, we're recording this in

May, late May, I guess, of 20, 25.

People are probably gonna be able to listen to it in June or something.

this whole doge government efficiency thing is going on and, I'm a strategic

guy also, and, as an industrial and systems engineer, I love talking about

efficiency, effectiveness and all that.

Mm-hmm.

sort of enjoying what's going on, but I haven't gotten enough information on it.

And I was just wondering, you really think that government

can be effective and efficient?

Sounds like you've done that at some of the state and local levels.

Do you think we

Mm-hmm.

federal level?

Well, actually worked for the federal government for five years.

I came to Austin, I needed a job, and so I started work at the IRS as a tax examiner.

Oh boy.

And yeah, we had production quotas.

We had, you know, if you didn't meet your quota, you got fired.

So, this was early eighties and then I became the payroll officer.

And when I became the payroll officer, we were automating from

punch cards to online data entry.

And this is really how I got into it in the first place.

I was the user, I was the customer.

And I said to the programmer, I want the screens to default

two weeks with all eights.

So if someone's perfect attendance, they just hit enter instead of typing

8, 8, 8, 8, 6,000 times, twice a month.

And we had 6,000 employees and the guy had a short sleeve

white shirt, skinny black tie.

A big, thick black glasses and yes, a plastic pencil protector.

And he said, no, I can't do it.

So he scurried off and he scurry back the next week and go, okay, I can do it.

So he is taught to say no to anything I asked for, and then asked

the boss if the boss cleared it, then he could come back and do it.

And that's actually why I, I needed to get some technical skills.

So I didn't have a guy like that hold me hostage for the rest of my career.

And that's what attracted me to Arthur Anderson, which had

a three year training program.

That's interesting.

So that was a good experience working in the federal

Yeah, well they were good because it was a union shop and.

It was an eight hour day and that was it.

And I was going to grad school three years part-time, working

full-time grad school part-time.

They would allow me to use my vacation to take classes at Tuesday at 2:00 PM and I

was at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Wilbur Cohen was the HEW secretary.

Ray Marshall was a labor secretary Barbara Jordan was a

congresswoman who was on faculty.

Well, I could go to their classes even though they were in the middle of the day.

So they were, helpful in getting me where I needed to get to.

Yeah, that's good.

Yeah, I'm intrigued by what might be going on.

'cause we know government can keep getting bigger and bigger and so I'm

hopeful that maybe we'll see efficiencies.

Maybe they need more people like, you in there.

I'm not sure about Elon Musk.

He's slicing and dicing and all, but

Well,

not

know, there's,

But sometimes you

yeah,

Right.

I've never been a fan of fire ready, aim, you have to plan it out,

Yeah, I think

I'm confident, you know, I've seen where that retirement agency, we had a

recommendation of how they could manage their cash better and it came from

the woman in charge of cash management and I gave her all the credit, but

they basically paid our fees with implementing that one recommendation.

right.

Well, very good.

I wanna go over to, the thing that was interesting to me about the book as

an author myself, I'm always intrigued by titles, but subtitles seem to mean

more to me, and I'm sure when you're working with your publisher, y'all

are having these conversations about, gotta grab people with the title.

to me, subtitles, tell me more about what the book is really about.

So your subtitle is to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships.

And what's interesting is up at the top there

Mm-hmm.

to me that's more the title, but we have to come up with these catchy

flashy titles and stuff like that.

I'm gonna pick apart some of these words and I want you to tell

Sure.

a little bit more about 'em.

I want to designate, first of all we define an authentic, that's a word

Hmm.

throw around a good bit in our culture today, How do you define that?

It's a relationship where it's mutually beneficial and you're helping each other.

And it's something that lasts over years and sometimes decades.

So a good example is I had a really good client.

I worked on three or four successful projects with 15 years later, she calls me

out of the blue and it we're talking, it's like we hadn't stopped working together.

You know, it's, that's your litmus test.

And she goes, you remember my son Bryce?

I said, yeah, I met him when he was five years old.

Well, he's an attorney now and he wants to apply for a job at the university.

Would you talk with him?

And it's like, of course I will.

You know, not a problem.

I talked to him and I said, okay, Bryce.

All the lawyers in higher ed talk to each other, find that organization

and you'll know all the issues.

So when I had a contract with Google, I got the contract for

University of California at Berkeley.

I didn't start from scratch.

You know, my lawyers reached out to them and So it is just

being mutually beneficial.

one thing I've observed that a little bit in that, and I also oversee some

sales organizations and people that are constantly churning through relationships.

Yeah.

a,

very costly.

Yeah.

every day you wake up, it's a brand new day.

I gotta go out and earn new business today,

Right.

to as someone almost 70.

I'm guessing you've had the cumulative effect in authentic relationships in your

Mm-hmm.

So Accenture has about an 80% client retention rate.

People love to be successful, so they reach out.

If you're successful with a client, they're gonna come

back and ask you to help again.

There are metrics about, you know, if you have an 80% retention versus 50%.

I mean, you can put numbers to that.

there was a sales team that had a 50% churn rate.

I met with their manager and his salespeople didn't

know any of the customers.

And they didn't know why it was important to know any of their customers.

And so we kicked them in the rear end and said, get out and talk to people.

So I think, um, you know, success, breed success and people, you

know, if you have a trusting relationship, then that will continue.

Well, the trusting relationship, but also it goes back to that

one of those third principles.

You actually care about the success

Yeah.

And I've even maybe making it even more succinct, you just care about others

versus you look at, I joke about it at times, has a dollar sign on their forehead

Mm-hmm.

that's where some people go through a churn because everything is transactional.

Yeah.

do think maybe like a foundation of what you're talking about is

that heart level truly caring

Mm-hmm.

other people.

People can sense that.

I mean, that's where you get authenticity.

You know, if you show up and you're trying to sell to an organization you

haven't bothered to read their look at their website and understand what

their mission is and their values and their vision, you're wasting my time.

I would've vendors come to me and they didn't bother looking at my website.

It's like, well, you'd know our strategic priorities for the last

eight years are on my website.

you didn't even bother looking at it, so you're wasting my time.

we're really describing, maybe 80 or 90% everyone who reaches out to me on

LinkedIn, because I've got some things in my bio that are very attractive

to, I guess, people that wanna connect with you and then immediately try

to sell you something in my inbox.

Yeah.

going, you could tell it's auto, and I'm going, that's

not the type person I want to

No.

And you brought up something earlier, you said people, the reason that a, you know,

there's such an, high retention rate, I guess, at Accenture is that they help

people be successful, but I also think.

People want to be successful, but they don't wanna be around jerks.

I mean,

Yep.

we're achieving some degree of business success, I still wanna feel good

when I go home at the end of the day.

Right.

right.

One of my best clients was a large research university in the Midwest,

and they were great leaders.

The CFO, provost and President were from the beginning.

You know, it's hard to change everyone's payroll and accounting, and it

sounds boring, but affects everybody.

But they w from the beginning, were so supportive and they

would say to the campus, they're gonna be problems in the future.

We're gonna get through 'em.

Just hang with us.

it's not a failure, it's just these things are hard.

And when I first interviewed with them, I was having lunch with the

provost and the CFO and I said.

You know, you have all the,

things you need to be successful.

I'd love to come help you.

help, this was in October, I said, but next June I have a

vacation plan to Australia.

And I was supposed to go last year, but I had to cancel it because of business.

So my wife and I have already bought the plane tickets.

We had the passports for us and the boys.

I need to go for three weeks, you know, and they said, oh, sure, that's fine.

And so started working with them and in March we hit our first big milestone.

We're meeting with the president.

CFO and Provost, and we're giving him an update.

And Mr. President, I wanna remind you, as I did the last three months,

that in June I'm gonna be going to Australia on vacation, his hands

started shaking just like I'm slow, motioning canceling my vacation.

Whoa.

And the CFO goes, and Provost Bo said, wait, Brad, hold on.

Mr. President, when Brad joined us in October, he talked about this vacation.

It's important to him and his family.

We should uphold our commitment.

Diane's gonna be in charge.

He's confident, she'll be fine.

we should let him go.

And so my client defended my vacation, which was awesome.

And 10 years later, my wife and I are back in the city, that city, and we had.

Dinner with the CFO and then his spouse we talked about that situation.

He goes, Brad, when you were gone, we were scared to death,

but that's the quality people.

even though they're scared to death, they trusted me and upheld their commitment.

that mutual accountability is part of an authentic relationship.

Right.

And the other, the other two words that I just wanted to ask you

about is, uh, well, you, the title said How to Create and Nurture.

Mm-hmm.

what do you wanna say about those two words?

Create and nurture?

Because we joked earlier about the networking events.

You know, the ones where you put your

Yeah.

on and you grab you a boatload of business cards that be dating ourselves.

'cause I'm not sure people carry around business cards

I think they do actually.

Some do.

they're digital, you know, on their phones and

Yeah.

you know, and they go out to these events where they spear people and all of that.

but whatever you wanna say here about creating.

And nurturing those relationships.

Well, let's start with create.

You need to be strategic and intentional with the relationships you're trying

to build, so you don't have to build relationships with everybody.

yeah, your boss is obvious, your direct reports is obvious.

with customers less obvious.

So you might have, you need to look at your customer base and prioritize

who are your best customers?

Who do you wanna work with, you know?

And then some customers you don't wanna work with.

I'm not the believer in the customer's always.

Right?

same thing with vendors.

I was spending Tens of millions of dollars a year on network

gear and all sorts of stuff.

Well, I got to know my strategic vendors and ask for a mutually

beneficial relationship.

So the creating part is first be strategic and intentional of who you're

going to build a relationship with.

And there was a chief financial officer in a large organization, his chief of

staff who's been there 30 years, had the trust of everyone in the organization.

And she and I helped with the transformation project.

I went to another similar size organization, talked to the chief of

staff of the CFO, and she literally said, I've only been here a year.

I'm not very influential.

I'm working on dinky little projects.

You shouldn't waste your time talking to me, which was awesome.

So that be intentional of who you wanna work with.

And this is something I coach my direct reports nurture is getting in front

of people in a consistent manner.

So just put it on your calendar.

I had on my calendar meet with the VP of public Safety every

month, always in his office.

So I could walk across campus and see people and see his team

and always have an agenda that you send out before the meeting.

'cause that's when you can make sure you're thinking

ahead about, you know what.

Every year I was irritating someone changing their phone or email,

you know, so you get ahead of it and tell people what's coming.

And then they were good at sharing feedback with me, how my staff doing,

you know, the vice president for facilities, we had a terrible relationship

with, because we were bad partners.

And so I, when I got there, I apologized for all the bad behavior in the past and

said, I want to be your best partner.

You know, we're building a $32 million data center.

I wanna be your best partner on this.

And we work to do that.

But every month I'm in their office talking about things, and then I

ask my staff, my direct reports to meet with their peers across campus.

Seven to 10 people every month or every six weeks, depending on

how closely you work with them.

And this woman who worked for me reminded me of this story.

She read the manuscript, said, you didn't put my story in there.

I said, what story?

when you demanded that I go out and meet with this manager who hated us.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

and you said you'd rather have us in the tent than outside the tent So she

went out and met with this person.

They hated us 'cause her past transgressions, not being truthful, not

doing what we said we were gonna do.

So we apologized for all the past transgressions and said

we really want to get better.

And as we got more customer oriented, more proactive, that

person could see us improve.

Over months, and after about eight or nine months, she became an advocate for us.

Well, that wouldn't have happened if my direct report was hiding in her

office, hiding behind the screen.

Hmm.

So that's the nurturing part.

It is.

That's good.

Thanks for clarifying those two that kind of triggered something in me.

When you talk about apologizing, one of the things in the book you

emphasize is, I think the word humility is a leadership trait.

I think it's something that maybe we all as leaders have to work on.

Mm-hmm.

root of humility, I think is that caring for others

Yeah.

others.

But can a leader remain humble without compromising, the confidence that

they need to share or even clarity of vision and maybe even decisiveness

that we talked about earlier.

what are some ways that that leader can remain humble, especially as

they're elevated in organizations?

Well, there are kind of two types of leaders.

There's the imperious leader who you need to come to them and supplicate, and

they are the smartest people in the room, in their view, very one way direction.

They don't care about you.

I was always trying to be the humble practitioner who is a team player.

I wanna be the coach.

I want a coach of the team, so that the team's successful, I'm successful.

And so I think just leaning on the expertise of your staff, leaning on the

expertise of people at the university.

there are a lot of really smart people there.

So when we were trying to pick software to encrypt laptops, I had the IT

directors help me pick the software

and you know, it's bringing the best minds to bear on these topics.

Not, me, being in the ivory tower just announcing things.

I found it.

This is kind of what helps, this is kind of what I heard you say, and I think it

relates to my It's kind of admitting that you don't know everything and that you

Right.

people.

That's right.

and I think in our world sometimes we see leadership examples that

maybe don't portray that, and we think that might be success

Yeah.

up to, our political offices, especially at the higher ups at times.

I like that humility.

my theory is that if you do not live out humility, it'll be forced upon you,

Mm-hmm.

you know?

Well, and you mentioned, you mentioned apologizing.

We have a quarter million devices hooked to the network every day.

What could possibly go wrong?

Something will go wrong, so my approach was it's not if something will go wrong.

But what do we do when it goes wrong?

And how do we keep it from happening again?

And we became much more transparent on, sorry about that outage.

Here's what happened.

This will keep it from happening again.

Please forgive us.

And some people hang onto these things For years, I had someone who was mad

about a transgression 15 years prior, and I literally just went to him

and said, I'm sorry that happened.

It was inappropriate.

Can you please let it go?

So you just have to be open and honest about it.

Yeah, I think all of that's good.

Brad, one of the things in the book you did is you kinda laid out, I

believe it was 10, I'm actually going back here to the comments wasn't

there 10 areas that you addressed?

Was that correct?

For,

the sphere?

Well, you've got part one, the internal sphere of influence.

right,

and then

which is your boss, direct reports, executive leaders and staff.

And then external is, customers, peers, and influencers and,

strategic vendor partners.

Right.

Exactly.

in looking back, this is kind of the, this is the trick question

to authors that put a lot of their time, energy, and effort into a book.

If there's anything that you would want to add to it now,

looking back, what might that be?

Anything you would be like, you know what, this is maybe something I've

observed or learned since, or it's the rest of the story or anything like that.

And I know that's a tough question for an author to say, this is

something that else, maybe it's your next book, I don't know.

Oh, I think I'm one and done.

you're, you're like a one in a, you're like, these guys that play college

ball for one season and they're

That's right.

anything,

you know,

back on it.

I was really pleased with my editor.

It took me five years.

So we started before the pandemic and then pandemic hit and she had a young son.

It's like, look, I'll call you in a year or two.

but I thought about it every day because I had the full outline, I had a direction.

And then what the publisher did, which I'm sure you had the same

experience, is it went through at least three substantial edits and each

editor had a different angle to it.

I had one say, well, Brad, I'm sure you feel better after writing that story,

but I don't think it adds to the book.

Why don't you take that one out?

And he was right.

You know, it was like, it was kind of a. Inappropriate,

but I felt better writing it.

but I think that allowed me to, and I was able to share the manuscript with

a lot of people who worked with me at Accenture and the university, and they all

brought up different angles and things.

So, nothing pops into my head at the moment.

Who would you say the book is for?

define the audience That you really, either you are writing it to them.

'cause sometimes when we're writing we've got someone or some type person in mind or

what you've observed as it's been released are gaining a lot of benefit from it.

Yeah.

I decided for people who want to, Be in the C-suite someday.

they're managers.

I got a lot of feedback from middle managers because

no one ever talks to them.

managing up and down I had a lot of positive feedback from middle

managers and people in the C-suite.

They said, geez, I wish I had read this 30 years ago.

I could have used some of these ideas.

on Amazon.

It's a bestseller in three categories, leadership, training, mentoring and

coaching and customer relations.

those were my target areas.

So I feel good about that.

Well, tell us where people can find, and I know Amazon, obviously that's a

place they can go get the book, but I believe you got a place people can connect

with you and maybe read a sample of it.

So give us all that info now.

And I got one more quick question before we wrap up.

I'm gonna send you our.

Customized link to my website that's tied to your web, podcast.

It will send your listeners to, free sample the book, how to buy the book,

and how to schedule time on my calendar.

Very good.

And is that your, is that your personal website?

Go

Yeah, it's www brad engle.com.

Perfect.

And I think you said maybe you'll do a slash seat.

Go create,

Yes.

that might be listening and don't have the visual and the links that

we'll include, we'll do that and make sure, I'd love for people to connect

and get the book or connect with you.

I know that there'll be people that'll really resonate with

your style and personality.

Brad, just, you got one more quick tip that maybe we didn't

cover that might help people?

There's the book against Fears of Influence that just might help 'em.

Just before we wrap up and I finish this up here, just something

Yeah, it, it, uh, back to my professor.

Get out from behind your screen.

Get outta your office and go Tell people you care.

That is a great tip.

Brad Englert, thank you.

Thank you for writing this book.

Thank you for taking your extensive career that spanned from Chicago to

Australia to all over and writing this book, spheres of Influence.

I'm holding it up for those that might be on, YouTube.

It might be a little fuzzy there.

And again, I love the subtitle, how to Create and Nurture

Authentic Business Relationships.

We'll have a link down below or you could jump on Amazon and, I appreciate you Brad.

Great.

listening in.

This is Seat Go Create.

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the comments and everything that we keep seeing over on YouTube.

YouTube's really growing right now

Hmm.

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Love what's going on with all the podcast channels.

thank you for all of that and just keep listening and sharing and we will see

everyone next week on Seek Go Create.