Biz Bites for Thought Leaders

Sustainable leadership and ai, a panel discussion with two people who haven’t met before this particular podcast, which makes it all the more exciting and it made for an absolutely amazing discussion. You do not wanna miss this episode. We have Johann, who has a background in sales coaching, and he brings decades of real world experience helping business owners scale through authentic, I should say, sales leadership.

But what we really love about his approach is he is so much purpose driven that he has also established a publishing company where proceeds a hundred percent of the proceeds, I should say, are going back to a charity in Africa. I. So we are talking to someone who truly understands purpose driven business, matching that with Brigitte Johnson, who is a master coach and strategist who spent 20 years helping leaders, particularly female lead leaders, I should say, navigate the challenges of sustainable success.

Sustainable is something that we are really gonna press home in this discussion. Mixed in with purpose driven and mixed in with the impact of ai. It makes for a really an amazing discussion from two people with incredible varying expertise who come together and really do agree on the way forward. So you don’t wanna miss this episode.

Sit back, relax, enjoy it, whatever you are doing, and make sure you listen to this full episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special episode of Biz Bites. I have two guests with me today. They haven’t met each other until a couple of moments ago, and this is gonna make it for an even more interesting discussion. So welcome both Johann and Brigitte.

Thank you. Thank you for the introduction and lovely to meet you too, Brigitte, on a short notice.

It’s been it’s always good to connect with new people.

Fantastic. Lovely to meet you Johann. Thanks for having us, Anthony.

Absolute pleasure. So as we like to do at the start of the program, it’ll allow each of you to introduce yourself. Johann, why don’t you kick things off and tell everyone a little bit about you.

Cool. So I’m very transparent. So Anthony, you can even ask any question throughout the show as well, both personal and professional. But on a professional level, I’ve got two business to. I basically help business owners make more money through sales. I do a lot of sales training, sales coaching, one-on-one coaching sales workshops with large and small medium organizations.

But the reason why I love it is I’ve been in sales since I was 14 and I’m now 40. So whatever I teach and preach for businesses are things that I’ve actually done in my own world. So that’s my big point of difference there. And then I’ve also got a second business. It’s a publishing company.

So I’ve created actually my first children’s book only about eight months ago, and I created a publishing company called Blueprint Publishing. And a hundred percent of the net proceeds of this children’s book that I created go to a charity in Africa. So on a personal level, that’s my purpose is is helping others and that’s part of function that.

So that’s a bit about me for now.

Fantastic. I love it. We have plenty to come back to. Brigitte, what about you? Introduce yourself a little bit.

Sensational Johann, that’s I could have done with that when my three kids were little. I am a bit of a rebel thinker. I’m a master coach and a strategist and pretty much a thinking partner for my clients, which range from leaders in education to across.

Probably quite a number of different sectors. I cannot think of many sectors that I haven’t worked in my 40 years of coaching and leading. So yeah so basically my core strength is curiosity. And I didn’t even know what coaching was. When I was leading a team of 50 back in the early, earlier part of this century.

And then. Discovered through McKinsey that this thing called coaching exists. And sure enough, I unleashed myself and set up my practice pretty much, within weeks. And so it’s been a journey of 20 years of my practice, which is really cool because I’ve got my three teenagers and my dog.

I love to travel and and help purpose centered humans to, to lead sustainably really is my core value.

I love that. It’s a it’s a lot of really important ideas that you’ve both hit upon there. And this is where I want to start this. Discussion. If I can talk to me a little bit, firstly, Brigitte, about that whole idea at the end, sustainability and purpose driven, because I think that’s such an important aspect and I know I can see Johann nodding his head.

And I know from reading a little bit about your background, Johann as well. I know this is something that’s important to you. So how do you define that? What actually is it?

Yeah. So for me a lot of the client community that I’m, I work with successful on the outside and hopefully on the inside. Female leaders struggle with common themes of burnout imposter syndrome just feeling like they’re just spread too thin and there’s not enough time.

Really. What we do is we look at, okay, what is sustainable success? How can we get to where we want to go and stay there and hang in because the world needs. More female leaders. We know that organizations that are, that have a good representative of females on the board and on in the C-suite do better.

Yeah. From an ROI perspective, they perform better. But our systems aren’t designed, haven’t been designed. For women historically. So what we’re looking at is, okay, how do we elevate the leader to have not just authentic leadership, but sustainable? So these are micro habits. These are evidence-based practices that you probably have heard of, but with coaching.

It creates that safe place for someone to sit and go, ah, you know what? I really marked that bit up. I’ve done it again. I’ve over committed or I’ve tipped the balance too far in, in the favor of work, and now I’m feeling, totally disconnected from my partner or my kids, or whatever it is.

So these are the sorts of issues that we help to address in coaching.

Yeah it’s such an important. Aspect, I think to be able to look at that whole notion of something that is sustainable. Because when you start with trying to elevate people, unless you’ve got longevity to it, it’s a hit and miss kind of scenario, isn’t it?

Correct.

And I guess that’s the element as well where coaching comes into it, doesn’t it? Because it’s about trying to find ways to keep maintain that.

Yeah, absolutely. We’re obviously in a very interesting time in history globally. There’s a lot of disruption regardless of what gender we are, for across the board for all of us politically economically there, there is enormous.

Disruption happening. And what we’re finding is that, and that, and I haven’t even got to the sort of, the main one, which is obviously the technology. And when we think about this, we’re looking at, okay, how can we be more human in our leader our approach to leadership agreed. How can we bring more empathy, more compassion, more resilience?

How can we navigate transitions because. Humans aren’t going to be replaced by machines in the most important aspects, which is connection, right? Um, sustainable leadership is also about riding that wave of technological disruption as well.

I think that’s something we need to come back to.

But Joanna, I wanna bring you in here because I think it’s really important to understand as well that sustainability. In terms of sales and sales leadership is incredibly important, isn’t it? Because there is a quick burn and a churn and burn theory that’s existed in the past as well. And if you want to survive, you have to find a way to make it sustainable.

Yeah, I think Brigitte, hit something ahead on the nail like I think my coaching aspects and philosophies are very aligned, and it might be for a different market, but. It’s for the same outcome. And usually when I work with business owners they have this expectation on maybe what they wanna achieve within their business, but it’s not necessarily aligned to what their staff think that achievement is.

So always this alignment. So sometimes what I need to actually do is integrate and alignment theory where both the owner has a target and the capacity of a salesperson as well. Because Brigitte mentioned, burnout is such a big thing. And I’m a big believer that compounding on small steps is such a greater thing than trying to do things on a massive scale than then burning out and ruin, ruining your whole ecosystem as well.

But the other thing that I like to personally do with sustainability is that when I’m associating or talking to a business owner, that’s what I primarily do is I don’t look at how business is performing, how internal. Perform. Are they in isolation mode? Are they neglecting, are they angry, are they frustrated?

And that usually will paint me a picture on what’s happening in the business, not vice versa. So I don’t look at the business. I actually look at the owner first and seeing how they’re reacting, trying to find out exactly what is happening within them. So that is my sustainability. Sustainability means long.

I’m a marathon. I run. And it’s all about steps. It’s all about doing things in slow patterns. So I’m a big believer in that too.

Yeah, sustainability is. Important and I think misunderstood word. You know, Brigitte, if I can bring you back in there, that I think people, think about it in terms of the environment.

They think about it this kind of eerie fairy sort of term, but it has more meaning and depth to it, doesn’t it? And is that getting through to people? Are people understanding what it really means?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m talking as practically and fundamentally as 70% of adults are not getting enough sleep.

We’re going about our day with our, executive functioning, nowhere near full throttle. So leaders making critical decisions, under enormous pressure. Sleep deprived, or, I love hearing Johann’s running. Just having that outlet. ’cause we know that kind of energy is important for sustainable leadership.

Yeah.

We know that’s what gets our, the blood flying to the brain and so those sort of fundamentals. But then there’s also. Sustainability I think about with purpose, right? Are we tapped into the purpose, the why of what we’re doing every day? How do we get that practice happening so that we’re actually not just clear on our own purpose, but also that our teams are really clear on why.

They’re doing what they’re doing and the difference that they’re making and the impact that they’re having. And I think that younger obviously the younger generations are really wanting to go to those purpose-led purpose-driven organizations. So you’re gonna win the war for talent when you have that.

Level of sustainability.

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You’re gonna win the War for Talent when you have that. Level of sustainability. And then there’s like that, there’s, look, I’ve got eight huge pillars of, of all of these micro habits that you can pull into your day. But we look at each leader individually and figure out where are your strengths?

Where are you energized? Where are you playing to those strengths? But where are also the blind spots or the weaknesses or the areas that you, you’re gonna. They’re gonna become big traps if we don’t address them quickly.

Yeah. It is important isn’t it, to try and understand that because there’s one thing zeroing in on your purpose, but it’s another thing as you say, trying to find those blind spots and yeah, and I think that’s an area that is.

Particularly interesting when you talk about the marathon and running step by step, like it gives you a lot of time to go, okay, you can focus on what’s in front of you, but what is on either side? What are those areas that you might be a little bit weaker on?

Yeah it is actually interesting.

A lot of people say to me, or how do you become such a great marathon runner? Or you don’t like to run, and it’s a natural gift, if I’m being honest with you. So I’ve always had that bit of advantage that. We’ve got like what Brigitte said, or strengths, and I’ve probably realized what those were.

Quite a young age, which is naturally sales, natural running, and I’ve influence. I succeed when I step out, not outta my comfort zone, but something that I’m not a specialist at, that’s when I really get fatigued. I really get burnt out and I actually really crash. And I’ve got a big faith background and I believe that we all have a special gift or two.

And I think sometimes we need to understand that we may have four or five different talents within us. And then how do we use us? Use it. So it’s not just happening for us, but through us to empower leaders, staff members, and everyone within our circle, both on a professional and personal level as well.

And that’s something that I really love to, to harness in. I believe that everyone’s got some, unique talent within them and had we extract it out so they can use it within the marketplace to benefit them. And I’m a big believer in that too, to be honest with you. You probably see me smile because I’m very passionate about that.

And it’s interesting I think all three of us have a very clear idea of what we. Great at and what our, superpowers for want of a better term are, but Brigitte, how easy is that to make sure that when you’re dealing with teams and people that in, in, whether it’s across an organization or just individuals coming to you, that their purpose has actually been realized That they’re not just going through the motions and fallen into something.

Because I think we’ve probably all done the same thing at various times in our career, right? Where we’ve fallen into something and we can do it. But it’s not our purpose. It’s not what we love.

Such a great question, Anthony. It’s that kind of golden, that zone of deep fulfillment when one’s strengths are aligned with the purpose of the team and the overall mission of the organization.

That is a sweet spot that I think, every young person or EE, every person, emerging leaders, established leaders. Everyone in an organization should have the opportunity to at least have that conversation with their manager of how do I align and bring more of my strengths to this role, and how do we evolve the role to suit me?

Because that’s when a team of individuals is more than the collection of the individuals. It’s a real kind of. It’s a force to be reckoned with. And the organizations, you can see them that get that that really actually tap into what’s the, what are the gifts that these people are bringing every day?

How do we dial that up? How do we get them more in flow, more energized with what they’re doing? More intel. We know that when you’re playing to your strengths and when you’re bringing your strengths to work and you’re acknowledged for that, and and there’s an outlet for that. The performance improvement is more than 40% sustainably, right?

So you are, people are feeling like they belong. They’re aligned with the purpose. And it’s extraordinary. It’s it’s so wonderful to see those benefits and this is where sometimes working with the leader to see that maybe they’ve got this candidate in this role that is not gonna, is not a good fit.

But it’s a great person for this activity over here. Let’s just change things up a bit. Let’s not be too fixed in our mindset of who we want in each role. So it’s a bit of bit like a jigsaw puzzle really.

Yeah it’s an interesting point. It’s something that sort of crosses over to the topic that I was discussing recently on another episode.

It’s that definition or that differentiation I should say, between management and leadership because they’re not the same thing. And trying to find people that might be a leader in a certain area doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be a manager. The people who are the best at their particular area of expertise doesn’t necessarily make them a manager or, they might be a leader, but they might not be a manager.

And we very often.

Very different. I think it’s a very different d different aspects, isn’t it? And the reason why I just jumped in there was I was talking to an individual after a workshop and lovely lady said to me, I wanna become a leader within my organization, but I haven’t got that management title.

And I actually said that there are many functions you can do internally without that title. You don’t need that title to become an actual leader. Leader leadership actually starts within yourself and what you do without people recognizing it. So we went through some structural behaviors for who to implement within the workplace, but I said actually for experience, what you can actually do, if you want real hard core evidence, is go out to a local community group that needs volunteers.

Use those leadership examples or skills that you’re learning in that environment. See how it’s actually portrayed, and then use it within your workplace. And the feedback was that, hey, in this volunteering place, I’ve got the experience of real leadership. This is what I don’t like about it. This is what I love about it.

And within her workplace, she had the confidence to then talk to her manager and saying, look, I wanna become a leader. But even without the title, but what can I do with you to, blow up my leadership skills? And it was such an amazing thing to, to see. So I think with leadership you don’t need to be a manager or a title or a director.

In fact anyone, everyone’s a leader in some sort of capacity where it might be at home anyway or in, in any environment. So I think it’s about having the confidence to know that. We all have leadership qualities, but then how do we utilize it in different environments as well? I think that’s very important as well.

Yeah. Brigittete, I’m interested in how you respond to that. I.

Johannn, that’s Kenny, because I’ve got a client that I’m working with at the moment who is definitely CEO material, but she has four kids and the realization and they’re at a certain age that, there’s just this small window, and she’s totally leadership material. But we’ve got to the point of do I want it now? Yeah. And the answer is not yet. That there’s times. To, and seasons in one’s life. And it’s fantastic problem to have that she’s, leadership material. She’s been tapped on the shoulder as well, so recognized, but to have that self-awareness and that ability or that maturity to go you know what?

I don’t think this is right for me right now. I’ll I’ll go this other path and then I’ll find my way there. There’s so many pathways but you’re spot on with that leadership influencing without authority, that self-leadership is absolutely where it all starts in my book as well. It’s, a hundred percent is, and then, the leadership journey unfolds, I believe as people are ready for it.

Yeah. So true. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because you often hear it in sports analogies lead by example. I. And that’s, that, that’s probably the one that, that most people relate to.

You watch a team, whatever team it might be, in whatever sport, and often the leader is that person that is digging in deep and when things are looking a little bit vulnerable in the game that’s when them, going and putting a little bit of extra effort in to try and rally the troops as it were.

And that’s really what leadership is about, isn’t it? It’s not, it doesn’t have to have the title.

Yeah, totally correct.

Yeah. And I think that’s something that isn’t recognized as well, but that’s, but there is that difficulty. Brigitte, bringing back to you. That’s one of the hard things about, you talk about women in business and particularly giving them recognition for where they’re at.

And that’s one of the hard things that they can be leaders within a business as part, the client that you’re referring to would be a leader within the business, but may not have the title of CEO or whatever the. The leadership is, the top management position might be, and that’s a hard thing too, isn’t it?

Because sometimes that title does carry weight. That is important.

Absolutely. It carries weight. There’s a reason that, you’re being paid the big bucks, the responsibility is on those shoulders to make. Really tough decisions. It’s not a popularity contest. We want our leaders, to, as I said, coming back full circle sus to, to sustain their level of.

The quality of thinking, the quality of leadership, and to sustain their energy because we know that organizations, are gonna everyone’s learning and following what the leader is role modeling. So it sets the cultural tone for the organization. And the flip side of that is what we’re seeing is, you get leaders making.

Poor judgment, poor ethical decisions, mucking up. They’re out, that’s it. They’ve self-sabotage, whatever. It has been gone and more and more we have less tolerance and less forgiveness for leaders making. Really bad mistakes because everything’s so transparent now.

Yeah. Agree.

And whether you like it or not that’s just the way it is. That’s another thing that I think that leaders of today are really exposed to, not just the rapid rate of change, pace of change. But this transparency.

Yeah. Yeah. It is it’s there is, and we wanna come into this rapid change in a moment, but yeah.

Johann, I just wanna bring you in as well as is that the. We’ve talked about CEO kind of level, but when you talk about sales management level, is there a discrepancy between the people who are the lead, who are the leaders, and who are the managers and who they have the title and who don’t in the sales area that you are seeing?

Yeah, look, sales is a very unfair part of a body of a business, unfortunately, because I think generally if you’ve got that management position and you’re not a leader, but you’re bringing a lot of revenue. Sometimes your optical lens will be focused on revenue rather than leadership qualities from a high management point of view.

And that’s probably the biggest thing that I see when I speak to owners. But they’re like, this guy might not be the best leader, but he’s a state manager or a manager because he brings in the most, revenue in. And then sometimes my argument is that I can guarantee if that person wasn’t in your business.

Your other people would fire up more to a level where that revenue will exceed. Because again, going to what Brigitte said, you’re gonna be more sustainable, more happy. You’re not gonna have that churn rate of salespeople leaving in and out, which is probably costing you more than what you realize. So I think when you’re coming from a coaching point of view, where’re a different set of lands that we’re not working in the business it’s an overview.

So the advantages that you get is we get to see things that. Maybe, a biased owner won’t be able to see. And I’m very transparent in those conversations that just because someone’s making the most numbers doesn’t mean they’re the best manager is a or a best leader. It’s two different functions.

Yeah. And yeah.

And sometimes right that taking people away from what they do best. In this case, they’re a leading sales person, means that they’re spending more time on the management side of things and not doing the thing that they’re probably a best at. And B, most importantly, love.

Yeah, correct. And I think just on that point, sometimes what I actually do is if you’ve got. A person who’s a manager and you’re expecting ’em to do a lot of sales, I tend to find out burnout really occurs, or again, a churn will occur ’cause there’s too much responsibilities. So sometimes it’s having that conversation that your sales managers are not there just to bring revenue, but it’s really to lead, inspire your team.

It’s all about, that’s how you scale. Sustainability, not just everyone’s trying to do everything. That’s where problems occur. And especially in sales, when people get desperate, when their revenue’s low, they do crazy things. They self-sabotage or a lot of bad things can occur in that place as well.

So it’s so important to be number one, transparent. But number two, just to, just to be flexible as well, and move people around. It’s very important.

Before we just come into the technology thing, there is one question I wanted to ask you, Johann, because it’s something that I’ve seen over the years and I’m wondering where you stand with this.

There’s an often sales sits. I wouldn’t say independent of the organization, but they seem to be a law unto themselves and often there’s a lot of friction between the operation side of the business and and sales. I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it firsthand very early on in my career where sales and operations were literally at 50 cuffs at this particular organization.

But is that something that still exists or is that, that those tensions seem to have watered down or what are you seeing?

I would say 95% of organizations still have it. I wish it wasn’t the case. And a framework that I actually will share with everyone, and this is just like free value is I always get both teams to be together.

And what I’ll do is I’ll ask the sales team, what are three things you’d like from your operations team? And I’ll ask the operations team, what are three things you’d love? From your sales team, and it’s not about cleaning a fresh start or a clean slate, but it’s about building trust slowly and over time as well.

And I’d be, I’m a big believer, my philosophy in sales is that when I do well, I’m helping people. I’m employing people. People are growing. I wanna support my operations team. And I always encourage the salespeople that your operations team are the backbone to what you do.

Yeah it’s really hard isn’t it?

Often to understand. I think part of it is the commission based, right? That’s a source of tension within a business because you’ve got operations who are paid a fixed wage, generally speaking, and then sales who are often on some sort of commission based, and so that. Breeds friction

inness.

Yeah, for sure.

Now I don’t suppose that there’s not really an answer to that one, so we’re gonna move on to something that I, that we’ve, you’ve all touched on, which is around technology and the, and there’s a lot of tension as well with technology at the moment, and it’s moving at such a rapid pace, particularly in the past couple of years with ai.

And there’s people who are, feel threatened by their job. There’s, there’s peoples whose business feels like they’re under threat because they need to move faster with technology than they can actually handle. Where does that sit firstly, in terms of leadership? Brigitte? Where is it that people should be positioning themselves in relation to technology?

How do they harness it?

Yeah, I think ignore it at your peril. Really. I’m there is no conversation that I’m having in any client boardroom where, it’s a good idea to I. Downplay the impact of ai. What we are seeing is, and you might have heard a lot of people talking about, be the thinking partner.

Use it, leverage it as a a thinking partner collaborate. I think it’s a, you are the master and it is the servant. It’s a very poor master. It, there is not an ethical kind of dimension there. There’s not a human dimension. These are not human beings, right? These are machines, right?

And we need to feed, but the opportunities. And what the applications that we’re seeing in organizations that have got this alignment with their purpose and their people, and they’re using and harnessing ai. To actually boost the roles, boost the performance of of their teams. It’s extraordinary, really inspiring.

One of the things that I was I was looking at was, how do you. Can you create an AI coach? Now, of course you can. I’ve actually created one, but with this little app replica, and Richard, my coach, he’s onto me, right? He’s holding me accountable, but I can ignore him. You can’t ignore me.

I’m actually right. I’m holding you accountable. So there’s and there’s also conversations and emotional intelligence and nuances and all the soft skills they can emulate, but it’s not there yet. But I love seeing, I love playing around with it. Because, it’s important to know where you sit in the world and not to be kidding yourself, that you are irreplaceable. My key strength is the relationship that I have with my clients that is. If that’s strong, then, and that’s what I train other coaches in too is be confident in that and really own that and own your presence as a human being and as a coach in terms of, having these authentic, real relationships.

The other thing I was just gonna say quickly, and we’ll come back to this hopefully later, but is in this area of mental health and. Looking at how can we leverage all of the apps, which we do. We teach, I’m a mental health first aid trainer, but we also look at how do we help people leverage apps and technology for E-Health because they can now get access to affordable mental health that was not previously available.

And there’s still unfortunately such a stigma in Australia. Around mental health conversations inside organizations. You think about sales teams and it’s warfare sometimes, right? And you’re looking at. Performance is key, right? The, and the the metrics are really king. Is it safe to to talk about, my vulnerabilities as an employee, maybe not.

So this and not anonymity that technology provides in the mental health space. Amazing.

Yeah, it’s, and it is, you’re right about harnessing the technology. It’s using it for good is certainly important. But I do wanna pick up on a point that you mentioned earlier in that, with the having a coach sitting as alongside of you, that’s a, that’s an AI.

Like any of any tools that you can switch on and off, you can switch them off. Which is, that’s the point about the human being. You can’t switch them off. Not to the same extent. There’s the unpredictability of that, that they call you at a, at an opportune time that you get messages in lots of different ways.

And the way those messages are said is very different to what an AI might do, that you can literally just turn off if you want to. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Johann, how are you seeing AI in the sales space and impacting that because that’s an area where there is a big increase in the use of it and the use of it potentially to replace people.

Yeah. Look, I’m a big futurist on ai. I love to always think for the future, and it’s a bit of a frequency that I have, but I actually getting a lot of salespeople and managers and owners of businesses, especially that SME space, to really embrace it because it’s gonna give SME opportunities where they can cut costs, not in terms of human capacity, but on tasks that rather than that sales person doing admin.

They can go out there and actually communicate with customers more because, like Brigitte pointed out, the best thing about ai, you can allow it to take off mundane tasks. But when it comes to creativity or human connection, you need that in sales, but you also need it in life. And I believe that if we encourage businesses to use it correctly and ethically, you are gonna have more opportunity.

Rather than having 20 meetings about, something that’s not productive, let AI do that. But then you and I, Anthony, or you and I, Brigitte, we can connect up in person and actually discuss real problems. But the other thing as well on the human side is that humans love other humans. And empathy, human connection, like love, energy.

We never be. Hopefully we’ll never be taken by ai. But AI will be able to take on jobs that don’t fulfill us. And I think coming back to what Brigitte probably said at the start, is, that’s gonna allow us more time for our purpose. When you think about it within the workplace, what tasks can be taken from AI and where can we sit within that business to use our time and value efficiently?

So I don’t think it’s about replacing staff. I think it’s about how do we change our skill sets within that marketplace, if that makes any sense.

It absolutely does. I think it’s a really important differentiation. I know a couple of instances in small businesses where AI have taken control of booking appointments, that they’ll answer a call and they’ll be able to have a conversation and book you in.

To have an appointment with the main person. So that’s more, as you say, more the administrative mechanics. Whereas if you’re trying to have a more creative conversation about, I. Buying a tool and you want some different kinds of ideas of it and other things that might happen as a result of it.

That involves a, booking an appointment and having a conversation with a human being. Yeah. And if you can make those more direct and channeled that’s definitely going to work. And it’s how. People learn to interact with the ais as well? I think at the moment, from various things that I’ve read and people that I’ve spoken to, it seems to be the rough percentage seems to be that 90% of people don’t even identify that it is an AI at the other end.

And those that don’t seem to care that it is because of the nature of the functionality of what they’re being involved with. And I think that’s going be the hard part is. Where do we start to draw some lines in the sand about saying, no, I don’t wanna deal with an ai, or, yes, I am happy to deal with an ai.

Will all the people be ethical in, in making it certain that everyone knows that you are dealing with an ai? Certainly those that I’ve talked to have make a point of saying if someone asks the question is, are you an ai? They will answer. Yes, I’m,

yep. And it’s, sorry to just jump in again, guys. Something that I actually practice with.

Of clients is when you’re communicating with a client, actually ask ’em how they wanna be communicated with and some will say, I don’t mind what it is. It could be an AI robot, or it could be just an email or a call, but you can have your people that says, I still want that human connection, and I’m still really big on that.

And I’m just looking forward for AI taking tasks away from us that don’t fulfill us, so we can have more time in the bank to do the things that make us more productive and mental health. We’re gonna have more tools. My, my wife has a Tony Robbins up on the phone that she can communicate with every day, and it’s great for those crisis points.

But then when you’re a deep conversation, you still need to reach out to a Brigitte or yourself, really meaning conversations where. It’s other problems, not just one or two problems as well.

It’s gonna be fun times.

Yeah. Fantastic. I I was going to say that I, it’s in the contracting. So you’ve raised a couple of really cool themes there.

One is the contracting with clients, certainly. So with each client engagement these are the options. We have client dashboards where we’ve got lots of resources that can be tailored for clients using ai. But really important with confidentiality and what is documented and how long we keeping, records.

So there’s the, this space, which is very much in this transparency and ethics, and it comes down to contracting, not just for making life convenient for me, but really how are we adding value. To the client relationship here, how are we adding value to the mission? How are we using, AI to, to really as you say, take these resources, offer, the this sort of grunt work.

Away from us, so that we are actually the quality of thinking, the caliber of our collaboration together, the thinking partnership with the areas that we can start getting into, which is creative thinking, which is problem solving, which is really exploring certainly relationship building and taking, making big decisions.

Those are, there’s more space to, to do those things. But again, it has to be negotiated without wanting to sound like a broken record. Yeah, it is. But because it’s, you can have a conversation one week and then the next week, this is the rate of changes. Suddenly there’s a new opportunity that’s opened up for a client.

What do they want to hear about it? Probably. But do we need to negotiate how we bring that on, into the, to the program of work or to the relationship? Yes. It requires a lot more collaboration.

Yeah. It’s it’s important isn’t it? That establishing that, that small point, but in a very important point, establishing that means of communication for people.

And the interesting thing is. Where people might say, oh, I don’t really care. But I think the truth is all people do care. They just don’t know which one they like the most or they want to understand where different ones are appropriate at different times. I think that’s the hard part, isn’t it?

It’s establishing, yes. Book an appointment. That’s a simple thing where an AI could do that functionality because it’s not, it’s a very straightforward task, but have a conversation about what’s going on in my business at the moment. Definitely a human conversation, right? Understanding mental health issues.

I imagine, there’s only a limit as to what AI can do, isn’t there?

Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting question or point that you’re making because what we know with high performing teams is when you have an organization and a team culture where there’s psychological safety, meaning it’s okay to not be okay.

This is and there’s a, and there’s a great deal of trust. This is great, but how psychologically safe do people feel if they’re worried about their jobs being, consumed by a computer? So what you want to gain is transparency, is, clarity from leaders on this is how we’re using technology.

This is how we want you to evolve. And are we upskilling? That’s

the,

our. People, to think, think differently and and see this as an opportunity. Do they feel supported in their roles to evolve? Because change is tricky. Do they feel valued? Do they feel like there’s a, a sort of a.

A conversational channel where they can grapple with some of the issues that they’re facing. So those organizations that have got that actually understand this is where we need to be to support our people with this change, then, you’re gonna see some fantastic results and, and it’s exciting, it’s really exciting. Hopefully it gives you more time to write children’s books, Johannn.

You know, it’s actually my first one and, I’m so passionate. I’ve got another book that I’m gonna be writing an adults book actually in August. Sure. About mental frameworks fantastic.

I can’t wait. So yeah, may, maybe it’ll give me more time, but we’ll see what happens.

I think that’s the interesting thing about change. And just to wrap up the the conversation and is that. It does give you more time to do different things. The question is what are you filling that up with, isn’t it?

It’s the rate of change is such that there’s an expectation that you will respond quicker. I had a exchange some messages last night with a with a client who was like how can we speed things up a little bit further? Can we instead of move away from email and can we use Telegram?

Can we use WhatsApp? The implication with some of those things are that you get in contact with people out of hours as well and trying to. And so it is, technology is pushing those boundaries and the speed of change and the availability, and it’s how you actually blend somewhere to find the time to what you should be doing.

And I think that’s the important thing is what you should be doing is important as creating that creativity in the workplace in order to be able to, promote some innovations and things that moving forward. So perhaps just get your thoughts on both of, on, on that. Just to wrap things up.

Johann what’s

So look, humans are very intelligent creatures. We’ll always survive different errors, I think those who are scared, if you’re watching this about ai, embrace it. If you look at history, always look at history. We’ve went through massive changes in different kind of times, and those times would make people scared that things are gonna change, their jobs are gonna be replaced, but we’re evolving human beings.

And I believe if we’ve made ai we’re intelligent enough to evolve above that too. So we just gotta believe that we can. And. Not be disrupted by those things and focus on what we can control and not what we can’t control as well, I think is a big thing.

Brigitte, how do you respond?

Just to wrap things up here.

Yeah. I think it’s a, it’s exciting times. Staying curious is really, I think, my key message for organizations and those that are seeking to, to have, as I said, this sustainable leadership. How do I stay in for the long term while, partnering with ai.

Upskilling learning as much as you can. But remembering that it’s the quality of your thinking, which you know, is gonna make a big difference to and make you irreplaceable when it comes to high performing teams. And. Organizations that, that you wanna be a part of, moving forward. So yeah I think it’s exciting times.

I think I just wanted to say thank you for the conversation because, looking at it from the different perspectives, certainly of sales and organizational leadership it there, there are extraordinary opportunities.

Yeah. And thank you again as well. Yeah, appreciate it.

No, thank you both.

It’s been a really fascinating discussion and I really appreciate it and certainly two very different perspectives and some in some regards, but I think there’s very much a common ground here and I think that’s what’s important and hopefully everyone listening in has got lots out of that. And of course, we will include in the show notes how to get in contact with both Joanne and Brigitte as well.

So thank you both again for being part of the program and, we look forward to everyone, to your company on the next episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Thank you very much.

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Mortgage broker Secrets, building trust and long-term client relationships. It’s something we can all learn from no matter what business you’re in. I have a fascinating discussion for you today with Eli who is going to talk not just about mortgage broking and some of the secrets behind banking and building client relationships, but also about mentoring and the value that has in building the future for your business for other people as well.

And the give back that has as well. It is a really interesting discussion that we are gonna have today, and there is something I promise you for every business thought leader to gain from this particular episode. So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and I have a very special guest. In fact, I don’t think we’ve had someone in this category on the show in the past, so I’m really interested to see where this conversation takes us. Eli, welcome to the program.

Hi Anthony.

Thanks for having me on, as I will say. And so yes, my name’s Eli and I’m a mortgage broker extraordinaire supposedly. And so I’ve been doing that for probably about 15 years, banking before that. And before that I was in small business myself, so I went across to the dark side at one stage when business was tough and banking was easier.

But that’s, could give me a good insight into sort of both, both sides of the coin and probably what has driven my business for the last 15 years.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The banking sector probably gone through some ups and downs at the moment. What’s the assessment of the banking sector given the, the global financial crisis and the cost of living crisis and all these things that have happened in the last little while?

I think banks work on the same premise. They’ve always had to retain, basically maintain their margin as best as possible, and, so they’ll put out policies to make sure that’s, that they’re competitive in their space. Not over competitive because they don’t wanna be seen as the, specifically the cheapest or whatever that implies.

But they certainly fight to keep, maintain their margins and that reflects in their credit policy, credit appetite. Obviously they’re driven also by government, policy as well. And so they’ll, I’m sure they make forward plans for any all sorts of different alternatives they might have to to do.

But at the end of the day, they give Australia’s unique in this space that banks give 70% of their profit back to the back, to their shareholders. That’s why most, a lot of people don’t complain about the banks too much because if they’re a bank shareholder, they’re making good money on their shares.

Whereas the rest of the world, you’ll find banks will only give back maybe 25, 30, 40% of their profit, and they retain the rest for their own growth and development. But anyway yeah, I think banks haven’t changed in all time. They just, they’re pretty fluid with what they do.

It is an interesting idea, isn’t it, in Australia where that it, it’s often questioned by the public, who are they more concerned about the clients or the shareholders? And that’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Because it’s fine if you’re sitting in both camps, but not everyone is. No,

I think their first I think first and foremost, it’s always been the shareholders. And then they’ll drive their policy around that to make sure that they’re obviously not losing customer share.

And we’re talking mainly about the big banks, and I’ll throw in Macquarie into there as well, because they still hold the lion’s share of of, in this case, mortgages in the Australian market. Commonwealth Bank being the largest of all. So yeah, I think the shareholders are still.

Primary focus, bottom line. You only have a look at their, this month they all released their profit taking, 4 billion, 3 billion. It’s a massive amount of money, which means they’ve, and so they haven’t actually gone backwards in the last 20 years, have they? So they’re maintaining their margins, which is what they want to do.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s an interesting position. For the public to decide where they go, because I think, we come round to the big thing, which is lending money. Because when it comes to putting money into a bank account these days, you are lucky to get very much interest.

It’s very little interest that you earn anyway. So it’s really about the lending side, which is the thing that most people think about in relation to banks these days, but. There’s a lot of alternatives now and that’s, but how real are those alternatives? What’s the breakup? Is it still the banks dominating?

In terms of share of market, yes. The banks will still dominate because they’re still the reason people are tied to the banks because they’ve got deposits, they’ve got bank accounts tied with them. The rest of the non-banking sector, which are not what they call deposit taking institutions their only re connection to those their clients is.

Generally lending. So they very rarely offer anything else. So you still have to go back to the bank to do all your daily banking needs. But that being said, with open banking and the way technology’s gone that’s obviously a lot easier these days. You don’t have, you don’t have to walk into a branch to do it, but you’re still tired.

For the most part financially to some sort of banking institution, whether you borrow from them or not. So they’ve always got a a leverage which they can, a lever they can pull to talk to those clients. But certainly non-bank lenders have taken a large slice of the mortgage industry, mortgage lending industry.

That continues to grow because the diversity of the kind of clients that the banks will do as opposed to what non-bank lenders will do, has grown. Although the banks are slightly catching up, but so there’s a market for each, but. The banks will never lose their, share, a large share of it because of their intrinsic connection through banking facilities, deposits, transactions that need to be made.

There’s all those sort of things. So it’s a close system in some ways. So

yeah it’s a challenge, isn’t it, because. The, I’ve often heard it said that one of the biggest issues for people is that the actual work that is involved in moving from one bank to another. There’s so much and there’s so little to be gained that it’s hardly worth the effort.

And that’s the biggest lever that they have to pull is the lack of inertia. As far as, most people are concerned. And look, and I could say I’m no different. Look, I was one of those people that I. When I was a kid in primary school that the Commonwealth Bank in those days offered the opportunity for you to open a bank account.

Yep. And that’s what happened as a kid. You opened a bank account there. I think my parents were still banking at the Commonwealth Bank then. I’ve pretty much been a Commonwealth Bank account holder. Then because

movement is hard. Interesting enough that those days the bank was not owned by the, it was not private bank.

It was owned by the government. The people owned it. Yes. So it was. You felt okay. That’s why they were able to go into schools and do all that sort of stuff because it wasn’t a private institution, which changed obviously many years ago. But like you, many others are still there.

They’re still banking with the Commonwealth. They, they complain. They go we don’t like this, we don’t like that. Can’t get hold of anybody but moving. Absolutely. There’s no inertia to move because what’s the difference? It’s another bank with the different rules. Same. Same outcome. You people move accounts and that when they move their lending, then they’ll tend to move everything across.

Business lets less so because there’s much more tied up in their transactional arrangements with the banks. So to move that moving a business is even less likely. So that’s why they ch and, but they’ll, but for the banks, the business accounts are much more lucrative.

Yeah. And I think that’s an interesting one because obviously a lot of the people that are listening into this program are business leaders, and that whole issue of being able to move banks for a business or even to have an alternative one.

I was talking to a colleague recently who showed me a system that he’s developed and it, and it’s more just of keeping things in different. In different pockets.

Yeah.

And we talked about the idea of setting it up in two banks, so it makes it less easy to touch things that you shouldn’t touch so that they can stay in their various buckets, which is a great concept.

And looking at where you can actually go to a new bank as a business holder to set up multi things. So you have multiple accounts. Gee, that’s hard work. They don’t make that easy.

And it’s even harder now because of even though digital technology has made everything a lot easier, but now with the, the fraud that’s going on and all the, and the ability for people to hack into accounts, the compliance regime, the security regime has tripled. So now to open I just recently moved, not bank accounts, but I just moved internet providers and website provider. And I had to change all my Microsoft and all that sort of stuff.

The amount of work. To get that moved across, double authentication. If you had the wrong password, you were locked out. It’s to the point where I think, and why am I doing this? Because it’s a nightmare. Banking much the same, to move accounts. Yeah, applying is easy, but providing all the relevant security information that we now need behind it takes time.

I I think what I find and maybe this is and I’m interested in your view, whether I’ve got a, a where I’m looking through a particular lens or not, do banks really and do many of the other institutions where you can do banking care much about small business. Really,

they all say they do.

And when they say, oh, we care about your business and blah, blah, blah, blah. Really the care of the business really comes down to the people that you’re dealing with in the bank. So the care factor is only as great, only as good as the person you’re dealing with. Even though the bank may have a banner saying, oh, we, we love small business.

But if they’ve got. Poor people in there with poor relationships, that’s where it breaks down. So having been a small business banker myself and a lot of those clients who I used to work with came with me when I became a broker because my relationship with them was strong. But then there are other bankers who just see what they do as transitory in their career path.

So they do what they have to do, tick boxes, blah, blah, blah. Do they really care about their small business clients? I don’t think so. Not only as much as they need to make sure that they, um, get repeat business, that they’re not that they’re not doing anything wrong or they don’t get, or the other way they don’t get any complaints by the, by their small business clients.

So do they really care? No.

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Get repeat business that they’re not that they’re not doing anything wrong or they don’t get, or the other way they don’t get any complaints by the, by their small business clients. So do they really care? No. The caring implies a sort of love, but there’s no love there. It’s, do we make money on you?

Yeah. Great. It’ll stay if we do, we make not make money on you. So move. We don’t care.

And is there a difference between, we talk about the, in Australia we certainly talk about the big four banks, but if you go beyond that to some of the smaller banks, and even if you go to the other alternative organizations. Do you is there a better deal there for business?

I think there’s, again, it depends. Small business has been such a variety of cases. I think we’re, I. Bigger banks for small business are good because they have the facilities, they have the technology to assist small businesses much better than smaller players.

Smaller players tend to be limited with their technology. Can’t do a wide variety of transactions, particularly if it’s overseas. It’s all case by case basis. If you’re just running a if your business is like just an owner owner operator, and it’s very simple. I. It’s just transactional.

You’re not needing much else from the bank. You can really go anywhere. And now with digital, you can just do whatever you need to do. But if your business relies on overdraft facilities, business loans overseas facilities, if you’re an importer or an export, if you’re dealing with overseas money, transactions, all that sort of bigger infrastructure stuff, then the big four unfortunately have still got that, I still own that space because it’s a legacy and that’s built into the world of finance. So for a small player to come along and try and get in there, not gonna happen, right? So everyone, the smaller guys tries niche, their markets. I would, they’re also there for clients that don’t fit the mold in terms of lending, let’s say they’re outside of the scope of what the bank will offer them, then yes, they’ll go to a smaller lender for business loans what they call non-conforming, or they might have built policies around serviceability.

So yeah, they’ll move there. But they won’t move their accounts. I’ll leave their accounts with the big, with the major and just take the lending from the small, smaller player. That answer your question? Not sure.

It’s, no, because it is an interesting thing that having been down this path a little bit and tried to invest, investigate it and what I found as well as we talked about Macquarie earlier on, and they have some specific targets that they have, and I think that’s an interesting thing about Macquarie perhaps versus some of the other banks where they are very specific about who they want as their client.

And they’re not afraid to say no. Yeah. Which is a lesson that really we should all learn in business. That, that that’s not necessarily a bad thing, knowing exactly who your client is and knowing who you say yes to, but importantly who you say no to.

Oh, absolutely. And Mac Macquarie is probably unique in that out of the bigger banks.

They’re very specific about the kind of clients they want to, they wanna bank, and if you don’t meet, and you might have a great business, but if you don’t meet that that criteria, they’ll just, they’ll politely say, look, thanks. But we’ll pass on this one. And it could be for various reasons, but, they know their lane, they wanna stick to that lane. I think it gives them better risk analysis on their client base. ’cause they’re not, haven’t got a wide, it’s not as wide as the bigger banks. Then again, the bigger banks don’t have, don’t really have that luxury in some way because they’re seen as being, part of the community finance structure. You can’t just pick and choose, guys, come on, I’ve got, as long as I service or I’ve got the facilities that you need to take me. Whereas Macquarie probably ’cause it’s a bit it’s not seen as part of the big four. Yeah, they can make their their choices a little bit more obvious.

What does that mean for you in your side of things as a broker? Does it mean that someone like you should also choose a very specific type of client, or does it mean that you’ve just also got, you can take any client, but you’ve gotta know which way to go depending on who the client is.

So as a broker, and I made for myself specifically, I made the conscious choice to stick with a certain kind of client similar to what I was already dealing with at the bank when I was there. So honestly, I don’t deal with first home buyers and I’ll tell a first home buyer. I’ll, if they’re one of my client’s kids, yeah I’ll look after them, but I don’t specifically chase that kind of business.

There are people that are brokers who do it much better than I do. And I’ll tell clients, say, look, I’m not your broker. And sometimes my approach to to lending and things like that doesn’t fit in with the client’s view of how they want things done. So I’m quite happy to say, look, I’ve got another broker.

Maybe he might be, or she might be better for what you need, but this is the way I work. So yeah, I do. Curate my clients, so to speak. ’cause that way I know who they are, they know who I am. And I think other brokers do the same in different areas. There are some brokers who specialize in first home buyers other, maybe distressed clients.

I think if you do that, it gives you a better focus on what your business is like, who. You can deal with in terms of banking or lending, the players you have to go to facilitate good outcomes for your clients. So it’s a, it’s, I think it’s a definitely a focus that I think a lot of brokers miss out, especially new ones coming on board because they wanna do everything, everything goes past their desk, they wanna do it all.

And, being a mentor to a couple of, to a number of brokers, I tell ’em no. I said do that because you need the experience, but start to develop a lane for yourself. It helps you with your marketing, helps you with your understanding of your clients if you try and keep within a specific lane of type of clients that you wanna deal with, and then that reputation comes back to you.

’cause they, oh, you go and see Fred because he’s really good on asset finance. You don’t go to anybody else. So to build your own brand as well, I think.

Yeah. And I agree. I think it’s a principle in business that is often taught, but very little, very often ignored. That whole idea of niching is such an important thing.

And I imagine particularly in a space like yours, we’ve just touched on it, that they’ve got, we’ve got the major banks, but there’s so many other lending options. Out there. And that’s just on the lending side. That alone, the banking side and then keeping it on top of who’s doing what and got what facilities available, including the electronic options and things like actually staying on top of what is in a particular area.

That’s, a massive task within itself, isn’t it?

My inbox floods over every morning with all the new players, new policies. Keeping up with it is I. Becoming a bit of a nightmare. So you’ll ne you, you’ll never know everything about everything even in your own space, no matter how niche you are.

You’ll never know everything. And so having good relationships with particular bank institutions, BDMs, and that is always helpful. And I still do it now. Even though I’ve been doing this for a long time, I think, oh, I’m not sure about that one. Or I’ll key I’ll email my BDM. And sometimes they don’t even know which is a problem.

So yeah, look, it’s, there’s such a, ’cause information is so easy to. Transport. It just, it hits you every day like a wave. So you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta wade through that. And again, if you’re niched, you can get rid of two thirds of it. ’cause it doesn’t relate to you, right? So you’re only concentrating the stuff that that matters.

And that’s much easier to remember. But you’ve then gotta have a system really where you start to put those changes somewhere that you, so you can remember where they are. But it’s not fa, it’s not far safe either. But this information overload is a massive issue I think for brokers, especially if you’re new and nothing.

Gee, it’s n it’s a nightmare.

Yeah. Because I think the volume of options is huge, isn’t it, these days. That’s the truth of it. If, if I come to you and say, okay, I’d like to borrow X amount of money I. What are my options? Like the list is a mile long really, isn’t it?

So you, you can short circuit that, that list because, so yeah, you’ve come to me and said, okay, I need X. So my first response would be, why? Y do you need X? What are you going, what are you? It’s a bit like a financial planner. You’ve gotta get beyond the initial need to understand what the purpose is, what the future looks like for what you wanna do.

And that will actually quite narrow then sometimes the people that you need to go to, because if you need to be able to plan, not just for what you need today, but to make sure that it’s flexible enough for what you wanna do. That it meet your goals down the track. So my conversations and teach that to my mentees as well have a full conversation.

Not about the rate, not about how much they wanna borrow, but understand why your client is doing what they’re doing, what’s the driver. ’cause quite often the drivers might be. Might, you might be a great driver and say, do you really want, need to do this at this point? So you need to question and push back on your clients sometimes as well.

So to make sure they’re thinking in the right way. ’cause sometimes it’s an emotional decision. Oh, that’s it, we’re selling up, we’re doing, or I’m buying, or whatever. And it’s an emotional decision. It’s not always the wisest decision. So I think brokers worth their salt, need to make that discovery.

Piece prime in their initial discussions because whatever comes outta that, it will be the loan, the amount, the product, the rate that, that’s all a consequence of your discussion. But there are many brokers that say, yep, no problems. I’ll find you a deal. Boom. That’s it. That doesn’t take into account really what might be a more important principle for why the client’s doing what they’re doing.

Yeah.

Intrigued about your profession because there’s a lot that I think other business people can learn from it because it is super, super competitive and I think it’s super competitive on three different levels because there is the option of, okay, there are multiple brokers. How do you choose one?

Then there’s also the option of, ah. Look, the big banks particularly do plenty of advertising. So why don’t I go directly to them? And then there’s the third option, which is, look, I’ll just sc the internet and find someone new myself. So in that kind of environment, how do you actually stand out in the first place?

Oh, that’s a good, that’s a good question, Anthony. Thank you. Standing out. So again, it comes down, I think to if, first of all, if you differentiate yourself by as we said before, niche that already sets you apart from all the other brokers that you need to compete with. You need to build a reputation about with clients, about what you do and how you do it and the outcomes you provide, and that builds your brand again, to differentiate you from somebody else.

Your biggest referral source is always going to be. People you’ve dealt with, the people they know. Because generally, I think maybe first home buyers, because they’re out, they’re technologically savvy, they’ll go on the internet and go and they’ll look at Google reviews, who’s got four out of five or five out of five?

I. Especially if their friends haven’t done any lending, but if their friends have all done some sort of lending before the first, per, the first people they’re gonna ask is them, because they’re people of trust. So if they trust their friends, they’ll certainly try their friend’s recommendation first.

They may follow it up with a Google search to see if the people that have been recommended are adequate or if they’ve got other favorable reviews which is no different than it was 20 years ago before Google. You go to mom and dad and say who’s the guy at the bank that I have to talk to?

Or when the brokers came through, you’d ask someone who’d used a broker? I haven’t used one before. ’cause they’re only new. Who do I go to? And so that is probably, I would say 85% of a broker’s business has to come from that because you’ve already got a trust level that starts when someone’s already knows who you are or something about you or being recommended.

By somebody else to you. The rest is all marketing, which is, funnel stuff. Put market, advertise, promise the world, I’ve got the cheapest rates, I’ve got this, I’ve got that, and you will get a certain volume of people through that. The quality, I, I would question the quality of the, of those kind of referrals that come through, but experience.

Will dictate and you will learn where to get your referral network. It’s not to say you don’t go and advertise or network. I think networking is important and you need to decide what kind of networking you’re doing as well. That’s more for referral partners rather than direct to clients. Think ref building, building a business in this industry is hard because you have to have, you have to have the track record to get the, brand up and running, and you can’t get a track record until someone actually refers you a loan. So you’ve gotta start at probably at the bottom end and try and get, as and do, and try and get as many client deals across the table and slowly shuffle through the till you finally start building a rapport with those clients.

Because otherwise why are you different to the guy down the road? No. It’s really just a case. Talk to the people you know, your family, your friends. Everybody know, even network meetings when I go there they always ask, so who’s your target market? Who do you want us to refer you to?

And I go, okay, before we start, there’s 20 people in the room. Put their hands up. You’ve got a mortgage. So 20, quite often. 20 outta 20 will put their hands on ’em and go, I don’t need to go any further. I’ve got 20 people right here, and you all know me, so sure, refer me your business. But how about.

Referring me your own business first, get to know what I do so that if you do wanna refer me to somebody else, you actually know how I work. Otherwise, I’m just a stranger to you that does loans. So I, I push hard saying, let me do the business for you first before you start referring me business.

But then you’re confident. So using the opportunity to plug your trade, especially if you’re going out to and meeting people. Don’t ask for a referral business. So the guy in front of you is the first deal you need to do. Or at least try and do. And that will measure, that’ll give you a measure of success to start building beyond that.

If you’ve if you’ve had a loan for at least a year, that being able to move to somewhere else, if that’s, the process. If you go, if. If you conduct a review and say listen, you can get a better deal by going over here. That’s possible, isn’t it? It’s not that, it’s not that you’re locked in for the length of the loan unless

you’ve got a fixed rate facility, which Australia’s an outlier in that because most other countries, when you get a loan, they’re all fixed rates.

So if you take a loan in America, it’s a fixed rate for 30 years. They’re not variable. So Australia’s a bit of an outlier in some of that, where we do most of our lending’s all variable. So yes, you can move and it’s easier saying I’m moving and move your loan. But then I ask the, I always ask the question, why are we moving?

Oh, better rate. I’m going, how much is it gonna save you? Is it worth one? Is it worth your time and effort? And two, is there a real saving in, in, in doing that? Just for, a small, and so I get a lot, we all get, as brokers saying, get me a better deal. What does that actually look like?

Are you having issues with your bank? Are you paying too much? I have. Look at your rate. Okay. It may be a small, maybe five, 10 basis points off where the cheapest bank is. But how long have you been with these guys? That’s, that’s important as well. People don’t realize that history does is important.

With banking institutions ’cause they see a consistency in what you’ve been doing. And quite often, sometimes that’s a contradiction sometimes and quite often. But what I’m trying to say is that don’t disregard your length of time with a particular institution that. In case there’s a decision to be made and it’s line ball a good reputation with the bank you’ve been dealing with can sometimes sway the bank to say, you know what?

We’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna give you the funding. Even though it doesn’t quite meet our criteria, because we’ve seen what you’ve been doing for the last 10 years with us. And that’s not always gonna be a deal winner, but it’s, it certainly puts weight on your side of the ledger.

Whereas you’re going to a new bank, it’s all lovey Doy. Oh, we love to bring it across. But we don’t like what you’ve done over here. Sorry. We can’t take you.

Yeah. And. I think on the back of all of that, what you are saying there, even from someone new’s coming to you and looking to change, is that there’s a de a large degree of service that needs to be offered by mortgage brokers.

But what fascinates me and is that from what I’ve observed, is that it’s an industry where there’s a lot of service When someone first walks in the door. Then it’s just thanks for coming. We’ll just hope that you sit there for the next 5, 10, 20 years and you will possibly call me if you decide you wanna change, you wanna move house or something like that.

But otherwise we’ll just take the little cut that we get and move on to the new client. Yeah.

So if, so there are two kinds of brokers in that space, there’s the ones that you’ve just described that all lovey-dovey in the first six to 12 months. And then the service level falls away because what?

What do I need to call the client for? Really? I. Their loan’s done and dusted. Then there’s the other half of brokering where is, yes, that’s true, but you need to stay in touch with your clients and technology makes it so much easier now to be able to put out feelers to your client base to see how they’re tra traveling.

Now we don’t actually lot, a lot of banks don’t give us line of sight of what their what their rates or appliance rates are. Some do. And there’s called interest creep where banks won’t always give them the full discount and they’ll all of a sudden, five years later, the margin between what they’ve started with and what’s available now is massive.

But sometimes you don’t get to see that. So that’s, I again, important. Even doing a once a year annual review, send me your. Statement because I want have a look to make sure that one, that you are in a competitive, you’ve got a competitive rate and two gives you an opportunity to talk to you about what are your plans for tomorrow or next week, next year.

They changed since we spoke. It’s a bit of engagement. Now the clients must say, look, no, it’s all good. Thanks very much. Tick box. Go away. Doesn’t matter. The first thing they’re gonna do is if they need something, they’re gonna, they’re gonna call you. Not the last broker they just spoke to 10 minutes ago who’s asked those same questions and you think hang on.

Eli hasn’t called me in freaking three years, not even an email. You know what, I’m, I’ve got no reason to stay with him. Brokers, he is offering me good, good service and change. Thanks very much. I’m outta here. And the broker only gets to know when he gets to know, they’re saying your loan has been discharged.

So for brokers is important because they’re. I don’t know if but we’ve got two parts of our business. One is the upfront commissions, which we make, but more importantly is there’s what’s called trailing commissions. So I’m not sure if you’re aware of what that is. So we get a very small percentage of what the outstanding balance is paid to us every month.

Now, the reason we get paid that is ’cause we’re meant to be servicing our clients. So we’re still getting paid for doing that, but most brokers or a lot of brokers don’t. That builds. That’s your superannuation, that’s your legacy. If you start getting leakage at the bottom, which means you’ve gotta keep replacing it, you’re not gonna grow your book.

All you’re gonna do is keep the book just about where it is, right? So the idea is to one, grow that that trailing book, because that’s really where the value of your business is in dollar terms. You can get up in the morning and know you’re making X amount for the year because it’s just gonna come in.

But retaining that. Is doubly important just as important as doing a new loan. ’cause for every loan that goes out the door, you’ve gotta rewrite another one. So easier to keep the one you’ve got than try and chase a new one. So it’s, yeah, it’s important that brokers do. Keep and stay. Again, it depends on their book as well.

If you’ve got a large commercial book for versus a residential book it would, might be slightly different approach. But certainly as again, with technology today, there is no excuse, no reason why you would not be outreaching to your clients at least once every six every 90 days. Just a quick email, and trigger points like birthdays, anniversaries, if you’ve done your job, you’ve got all that information.

It might seem a bit, oh yeah, this is just autogenerated when it comes through them, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a touch point, people know it’s just auto generated by the system still. It’s a touch point. Might trigger something. Oh, got in touch with Eli because A, B, and C. Yeah,

it’s, it, ’cause it’s fascinates me that, as someone in the early days of me starting a business, I did a lot of the networking and between that and other things I seem to automatically get on the list of a whole lot of mortgage brokers over the years.

And consistently what happens is, with the interest rates announcement comes out every month, you get, swamped with. The standard newsletters telling me what what I could read about in the news anyway. Yeah. And it’s just seems to be a very, consistent line that people tread.

And so that’s why I’m fascinated by the idea of standing out in your profession, because I think there’s a lot for other people to learn, is saying that you’re a very service on the, at the front end. You’re a very service dominated one. There is a degree of automation, as you say, that can happen there, but offering real service in between is ultimately what’s gonna make you grow even better.

And that’s. That’s something that a lot of businesses forget about. Not just only mortgage

brokers. No, absolutely. So you’ve gotta just rehashing what they’re, what clients can already read in the news. The rates have gone up, the economy’s crap, the inflation’s up. You’ve gotta put all that together and say.

Because I understand you. ’cause if you’ve done the right thing in the beginning, you’ve got good notes on what they’re, what the client does, whether they’re in business, whether they’re self-employed and maybe, or sorry, working PAYG in a particular industry. If you’ve got those notes and things change your approach to what you speak to them about, whether it’s by email, phone call, text, or whatever will be more pertinent, if you can then relate that to their own.

Situation. So if you’re dealing with a small business client. And rates have, changed and they can read all that and inflation’s gone up. So it, the reach out is about, look, this has changed. You and I both know that. Has that affected your business? Do you need some support in what you currently got?

Or maybe you’ve, what you’re currently looking at, so you are offering more than just, I’ll get you a better rate. You actually are actually, I’m just trying to get some interest in there. Their life and what’s going on. They might be a c you know, they might be a lawyer on high on, on high income, but they might, the lawyer’s got four investment properties.

He knows that the land tax has gone through the roof. You reach out and say, look, you and I both know land tax has gone through the roof. What have you done or what are you thinking of doing to maybe mitigate some of that? Have you spoken to a financial planner about maybe having a look at your structure and seeing.

What can be done about, so it’s not all by always about offering something that you can do for them, but, and that’s why networking is important to have the right net professionals in your network. Not so much for them to refer you business, but for you to be able to leverage off their expertise for your clients.

So when you reach out to them, that’s the service part. I’m not worried about your loan. What I’m worried about is are you structured right? Have you got the right plans in place? Have you spoken to a financial planner? If you haven’t, I’ve got two or three that I trust really well. Might be worthwhile talking to you ’cause you’ve got four properties and you’ve had them for a while and you haven’t done anything with them.

I’m just concerned that might, that you haven’t prepared yourself for what’s coming down the track. Do you wanna talk to somebody or have you, oh, are you already talking to somebody? And that’s great. Terrific. Move on. Using your networking partners, and I call ’em partners because I put ’em on my, I will put them on my website as partners with me.

Not because I want to get business from them, but I wanna offer their services to my clients to help them improve their circumstances. That doesn’t always translate into a business for me. It doesn’t matter. What it translates is into respecting who I am. And they think, you know what? The next person they speak to about maybe doing some boring, now you gotta go and see Ali.

You just gotta go and see him. Why? Because you just gotta have to see him. So that’s the mindset you put you’re trying to build that there’s a high level of trust in your relationship beyond the initial transaction.

It’s. It’s such an important thing, building that trust and and I like what you’re saying.

There’s a lot for other businesses to learn from, your approach and what makes you stand out. I wanted to touch on one other area just before we wrap things up because you mentioned it earlier and I a couple of times and I’m fascinated by it. Yeah. So you’re obviously mentoring a number of people.

Tell me how do you actually get into that space in the first place, and what does that actually, what does that actually look like and, and ultimately what’s the benefit to you?

Actually we actually, by accident, I actually met another broker at a networking meeting, which unusual, you don’t intend to go to networking meetings where there’s two of you.

But in this case there was we got on fairly well and we hooked up on LinkedIn as you do. And then. She was a mentor with a particular firm and that particular firm was looking for new mentors ’cause their business was growing. So I thought I can do that. Lemme see what I mean I’ve got all this stuff in my head.

I’d like to get it out give back to the industry because I see what Paul. Brokering does to clients. It’s like you get you get to hear them because I dealt with client with broker X and they absolutely screwed up my loan, right? So you, you get the driftwood that comes outta that.

So to be able to so I thought here’s a way I’m gonna be able to give back to the industry by trying to help. New to industry brokers developed their skills, developed their ethos, their ethics help them with deal scenarios, information. So yeah, I, I spoke with the woman who was, who owned it in Sydney and, after a couple of chats and meetings said, yep, no problem. We’ve got plenty of, we’ve got a few to already start giving you. And so that’s what I do. I, we deal, we, I speak to them sometimes, especially new ones. They’ll ring me three, four times a week, sometimes three, four times a day. How do I do this?

How do I, what should I do? The joy out of what you’re do doing that is, yeah. Initially it’s what have I done here? I’ve just adopted, two, four year olds. But what happens is over time is they get more confident, they get more expertise at what they do. And actually, I feel that, that help.

I feel good because I think you’re good. You’ve grown and like your own kids. You, when you see your kids grow and they’re successful. You take some kudos in that, right? So make, it’s always about the giver. The giver gets more than the person who gives who receives.

’cause the giver receives that sort of good feeling about what they’ve done. So yeah. It’s, I realize how much, when I do that with the with mentees, I actually realize how much I actually know that I don’t, that I don’t remember knowing. ’cause unless you actually use it, you don’t remember it.

But it just comes flooding out and I, and then at the end of the conversation go, I should have, I’m glad I remembered that. ’cause I didn’t know actually. You remembered it, knew it. No, it’s a it’s good fun, but also actually you get to weed out the rubbish because sometimes you get.

Guys, girls are coming in and you think, why are you being a broker? And so we have our initial first in interview about how the relationship’s gonna work. And I give feedback to the owner of the business. I’m going, look, this one’s gonna be finished in six weeks. I’m telling you now. How do you know that?

I just know. And lo and behold, six weeks later. They’re gone. But that’s just, I think that’s a good thing. ’cause you don’t you need to it’s a weeding out process. So you want people getting into the industry who know what they’re doing, passionate about what they do and will improve the industry in the whole, which improves our reputation as brokers.

Look, 85% of all lendings done by brokers now, so we can’t be doing it that bad a job.

I love it. And it’s so you can hear the joy that you get by being a mentor from the way you talk about it. And I think that in itself is a good way of describing how much benefit there is to you, is there is or clearly to the people who are who you are mentoring.

Just to wrap things up, a question that I like to ask all my guests on the program is what’s the aha moment? That people have when they come to work with you?

The aha moment? When I haven’t, the aha moment comes when, why haven’t you asked me how much money I want? I’ll go through that process of, tell me the Anthony story.

That’s my first question to all clients. Going back to an old, television personality. He used to ask his invitees on his show. That was always his first question. Tell me the Anthony story and then just sit back and let the floodgates open. And by 20 minutes later, we haven’t even talked about anything financial.

I’ve, I’ve learned about them, their history, much like what we’ve done a little bit today. Yeah. And by the time we get to the point where, okay, let’s talk about what we’re gonna be doing. I’m going, oh, okay. It’s a trust moment. That’s, I think for them it’s a, they feel relieved that the person they’re talking to actually cares about who they are, what they do, and why they want to do it.

But it’s not a transaction for them. That’s the aha moment. And that can take 20 minutes, depends.

Relationships. Relationships are everything. And it starts. From the moment you first meet people, and I love the approach that you take to that. And and I thank you for being so open about, the different choices and the different options that are available to people because I think there’s a lot for people to learn, not just about specifically about where to go for.

And what to look at in terms of mortgage brokers, but even generally about how you approach being a service related business. And I think that’s what being a thought leader is all about. And I appreciate you being part of the program,

Anthony. Thanks very much for having me on. And it’s been a, it’s been an eyeopener for me as well.

Thank you and thank you everyone for listening in. And of course, don’t forget to check out the show notes for all the information on how to get in touch with Eli, as well as other information about the show. And we hope that you will of course, hit the button to subscribe. We look forward to your company next time on this bytes for thought leaders.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.

We have a manager readiness crisis. Why Leadership development is failing your business. We are joined today by expert JD Walter, and let me tell you thought leaders, you are setting your managers up for failure. It is a fact that employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers. Join us for this very special and important episode because traditional leadership models are most definitely broken, and there’s a critical gap that’s costing your business.

We are going to talk about management as a skill set on its own and separate it from technical expertise. It is a whole different way of thinking. You’re gonna get some very practical strategies to develop your managers. And to truly drive some peak performance. We are also going to talk about leadership itself and the human side of business success.

This is a great episode, some amazing insights, and a very special offer at the end of the podcast. So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. You will be a little bit familiar with my guest today. He appeared on a panel podcast that we aired just a couple of weeks back. Jd, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Anthony. It’s great to.

See you again and come on your show one more time. So thanks.

Look, it’s an absolute pleasure and I think there’s a big topic that we’re gonna discuss today about manager readiness, and I think it’s been, as you like to say, a topic that’s been neglected a little bit. But before we get into that, why don’t you refresh everyone’s memories and tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Sure. So my name is JD Walter. I own a company called Walteric. We’re a small learning workforce, learning and development company. We focus primarily on human skills development and what I. I got into this backwards, I started out really studying and looking at and experiencing organizations from that structural, systematic perspective.

So all of the administrative and management sciences were in my wheelhouse. Over the years I came to realize that you, it’s an incomplete equation if you really wanna understand how to achieve peak performance in an organization. And that got me thinking more about the human aspect. And what I mean by that is humans not as assets or resources in an organization, but.

Humans as human beings and all of the fun stuff that goes into us being these psychological creatures, these emotional creatures and how we bring our lives with us to work every day and we take our work home with us every night and all of the things that swirl around us and how they influence and impact our behavior.

And so it caught my attention years ago when somebody said work life balance. And I was like, man, I really have an issue with this. Because I don’t feel like I, I can segment. And as I thought more about human experience, I realized there’s no way to compartmentalize this. There’s just life, right?

And we live it. And there’s a number of things that we do in it. It really got me focused in on this human piece. And so now. What I focus on, we can do technical training, but what we really like to do is get in the room with small groups and mix it up over a couple of days and really dive deep into some of these competencies that are just absolutely critical for not just success in an organization, but success in life. So things like leadership and emotional intelligence and strategic thinking.

These are all important things that I wanna get into in a moment, but I just want to start off as well with the idea that you alluded to there about both about work life balance and this idea that you can, that it’s all just life.

Because, we have this I don’t know if you’ve seen it, there’s a show on Apple TV at the moment called severance and the whole idea based around this, that you could go to work and completely forget that your. Outside life and vice versa. And. But, and that’s a, it really is based on a principle that many had for so long, wasn’t it, that when you come to work, you should leave all your personal life behind.

It’s just not possible to do that. And particularly post COVID where this whole work from home idea has become so. Prominent and I, in fact, I just read recently a survey which suggested that the whole push to get people to come back into the office is flawed because most people want to spend 60 to 70% of their time still working from home it’s. This work-life balance idea is an outdated idea.

I, yeah, I think as a concept I think we’re starting to recognize its outmoded ness, right? But it’s never been realistic in that we can actually do this, that we could actually achieve it. I think if you go back to the industrial age and you think about work and life where you’re standing in a factory and you’re, you’re hammering steel or you’re, putting fenders on cars, et cetera, those things are easy to leave behind because there is no work to take home.

We live in an age now, knowledge work, predominates and or dominates and. So we all have the ability to take our work home with us because it’s not just, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna go home and write this report that I didn’t have time to write today. I think things are getting so fused together that it’s hard to distinguish the thoughts, right?

So the thoughts about how do I better connect with these people that I’m working with? So that we have a better work experience so that, fill in the blank, right? Reduce stress, less absenteeism, all those things that we’re shooting for. Those principles apply right across the board in terms of our lives.

And so it, I stopped thinking about work skills and, soft skills and hard skills and I just, I think about human skills and what are, there’s, so the way I think about it now is there’s job skills. I’m an accountant. This is how I use Excel. Here’s a p and l. These are the things that you have to do.

And then there’s. Life skills or human skills. It’s all the stuff that makes us wonderful creatures, but it’s also all the things that is incredibly vital for us to be able to. Get along.

Yeah. I think that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s more and more these days that differentiation of your own human experience is going to become more and more prevalent

Otherwise, you may as well just be it, a robot yourself and whilst that was a term that was used in the past without much real meaning to it. Nowadays with the advent of ai, it’s. Realistic that, everyone is just, can just be the same if all you do is utilize the same as everybody else.

So in using your own human experience is absolutely vital.

Yeah. Going back to your show idea, I haven’t watched any of the episodes, but the premise is interesting. It also just scares the crap out of me. That, that, that’s an appealing, now it’s a great, I’m not, this is not a comment on the show, but rather the idea that idea could be appealing.

I would, I would be so scared of missing, I. Those moments, right? All of those things that are required from our past that inform our present. And if you’re bifurcating that and you’re taking a, an entire, a major chunk of your life and you’re saying, okay we’re putting this behind closed doors, and you have no access to these memories until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

I, it feels like there’s gonna be a lot of repeated mistakes. It feels like we’re not gonna learn as fast. We’re not gonna grow and develop to the level that I think we all aspire to. And I don’t so ultimately our contribution, not just at work, but our contribution in life becomes grossly diminished, right?

Because we don’t have the totality of this lived experience to draw from. And I, that scares me because I think I’m constantly going back through these, through the hard drive in my head to find all those nuggets and to remember things and to think through. I go back and do my own like case studies.

I go back to experiences where. I am only now just realizing how poorly I behaved in a particular moment, and this could be 20 years ago. But I go back and I think about it because I was there. I know all the details. I experienced it. I was the one that behaved and I think through. The scenarios, like, how could I have done that differently?

Because these are the same things that we do in workshops. This is exact same conversations that I’m gonna have with participants trying to figure out what our ideal is and how we wanna move forward. Developing ourselves. And yeah, that I. That bums me out that would even be, I would not sign up for that.

I was sitting

here thinking as you were talking, going. The ironic thing about it is this, first of all, it only came on by complete accident last night when I was watching it, I was watching something else on Apple and I was distracted putting some dishes away, whatever I was doing, and automatically another show came on and this came on.

And the ironic thing about it is. That if I hadn’t have let it play, and I hadn’t have remembered it, if we had have been, in exactly as the show says, I had have severed my personal life from my work life, we wouldn’t be able to talk about it this morning anyway yeah. So it’s a it’s an interesting irony with it.

Anyway, but I think what, getting back to the whole idea of what you are focusing on is around around managers and. The whole idea that they’re being undervalued at the moment, and I think this is an important thing for listeners of the podcast to understand because you are either the manager or you are the CEO business owner who has managers underneath them, and whichever you are.

You’re still wanting them to encourage them to be thought leaders. And so if we are not doing that, if we are not valuing them, then that’s at real risk and that pushes everyone down. So tell me a little bit more about how you’ve recognized that this is a, this is an issue in the first place.

Like so many things something pops up and just catches my attention. And as I ruminate on it longer and longer I start to feel something about it. And this is it goes back to every single one of those. Posters and LinkedIn posts and wherever else you find them. That, and this is a distillation of all of them, but it’s managers direct and leaders inspire.

And that just chaffs me because when you get down to it, leadership is a, quality management is a function. There are, we don’t go out and we don’t hire leaders. We want people that have leadership qualities, but we don’t hire a position called leader. We hire an executive, a director, a division manager, maybe a team lead, but they’re still a manager or a supervisor.

So this is the first, and I think the biggest thing, this is what really got me thinking about managers, was. What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy. It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management, and at worst, a replacement for it.

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We will do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it. So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au. Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites.

What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy.

It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management. At worst, a replacement for it. And so when I think about organizations, and I think about the organizations that I’ve been in and what I hear from employees constantly, and we know all the data, right? 85% of employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers, right?

We talk about what do employees, I’ve done tons of focus groups with employees. What do they want? They want to see equity and workload distribution. I. And part of the reason is because they feel like they’re overworked and they observe others not. They see the distribution of special projects and they look at those special projects as I.

An opportunity to develop, to stretch and to be recognized and they don’t get the opportunity. So there’s something about workload distribution, there’s something about time management. Do we create space so that individual contributors can do deep work? Or coming out of COVID, are we jamming everybody with, constant back to back meetings And there’s all kinds of stuff that we can talk about, how detrimental that is.

But, so it was the starting point was this idea of leadership. And management and of, and I was all in on leadership and I started studying it. I do did a lot of guest lectures on leadership and championing the idea, but it started to come up as a competition or this binary that I thought was incredibly disruptive.

So what I’m talking about here is we set managers up as the evil empire. We didn’t like ’em in the first place. Now we hate ’em. So that’s strike number one against managers. But what I’ve also observed is that organizations aren’t developing managers and here’s a typical scenario, right Anthony, you are the top technician in our organization.

So I want you to be a manager. Have fun. Hold on. Management is its own skillset. Yes. The knowledge and expertise that you have as a technician helps you manage that group of work. We have to remember that a manager’s job in every organization, and people won’t like these words, but I use them deliberately.

Is command and control of production, executive sets, visions and strategies managers take that strategy and operationalize it so that the technicians can actually go complete the tasks, right? So this command and control over production is the direct frontline oversight for this thing called production.

We’ve gone through all these different epochs of management where, we started out, maybe it was more systematic looks at organizations. We got into standardization at some point. And you draw the string out. And and these are approaches to improving management. I think leadership is an approach to improving management.

I don’t think it is a competing idea. And to go back to why are managers under fire? So first of all, just like everybody else, they’re under stress. If they don’t have resilience developed through, some aspect of their existence, whether it’s in their personal life or their professional life, they don’t have the self-awareness to behave the way individual contributors or executives are gonna expect them to behave.

When their work, their individual contributors are under stress. They don’t have the awareness, the social awareness to recognize that something’s happening in this group of individuals. And then to be able to employ authentic empathy and to bring them into a conversation to understand what is actually going on in the moment so that the manager could potentially do something about it.

So they’re not developed as, they don’t have a manager skillset. They’re not trained in leadership. The competency of leadership, they are, overlooked as a vital component of the organization. And there’s this sort of, this binary that I talked about. So all of these things come together and have put a premium on, kinda banging on managers.

And so I. I wanna champion them because I’ve seen too many managers just being beaten down in organizations. These are good people that are trying to do good things and they’re struggling on their days. And when that fear takes over, the default is to white knuckle your environment, and that’s what micromanagement is.

And nothing kills the human experience inside of an organization, particularly for individual contributors. When. Somebody’s trying to micromanage every aspect of their work existence.

There’s so many things in what you’ve just been talking about that I think back even on my observations of different organizations, and you’ve got this concept of lead by example, which I think is, I.

Embedded in this concept that someone’s been thrust into being a manager and the only thing that they know about managing is to keep doing what they’re doing, which is not really leading. It might work in a sports environment. It might be that, if you’re in a, if you’re on the football field and you are leading it, and you are the leader of a team, that the best way to lead is by you, up your enthusiasm.

You get in there and you. You make the tackles, you lead the attack, whatever it might be, that can be leading by example, but the sports field isn’t necessarily always relevant to the business field. And getting in there and just doing and getting your hands dirty and doing all that stuff isn’t always the answer.

If you’re a manager, I.

I love that analogy because it makes me think of divisions of labor. There’s a reason that we have specialization of labor within an organization. There’s a reason that there are individual contributors, managers, and executives. Everybody plays a very specific function.

If you go and at all each of those levels, they’re not homogenous, right? Individual contributors don’t do the exact same thing. So take take the football pitch and say, I’m the center. You’re a wing and somebody else is a defender. Okay? We all have three very specific roles to play.

Now. We can be a leader in terms of positive attitude grit, determination, celebrating each other, lifting our teammates up, all of those things. But we can’t do anybody else’s job. So part of being a manager. Is creating that environment where somebody can do their job to be able to be the individual contributors that most employees wanna be.

It requires some level of autonomy, trust, right? And a willingness to accept. Failure at least at a small scale, right? Because those are perfect learning opportunities and failure is the impetus for innovation. So if we if I’m an individual contributor and I don’t have at least the autonomy to control my immediate production environment, my tasks, if I don’t have some control over that.

I it’s hard for me to connect to it. I don’t, there’s no way for me to own it, right? I’m just stamping out widgets, and that’s not what we’re looking for in employees. In a modern world, what we’re looking for is strategic thinkers. We’re looking for problem solvers. We’re looking for innovators, even at the lowest level in an organization, those individuals are critical.

You do this work on a daily basis. You are the one. In the best position to say, listen, there’s 27 extra keystrokes here that we can get rid of. There are four forms that we don’t have to fill out anymore. We don’t have to wet sign this. You know what, this doesn’t need to go through four people. I. In the routing chain, just one approval is all we need, X, Y, and Z.

But those are the ones that are observing that work on a daily basis, and so they’re in the best position to be able to say how it can be innovated. Now, those innovations are smaller in scale from an organizational perspective. But they’re vital because if you don’t hit efficiency at this ground level, you’ll never ev never be able to get to efficiency at the macro level.

So the manager needs to be prepared to grant that autonomy and to some degree, push back when someone above them. Doesn’t want, doesn’t appreciate that. Doesn’t like that. Hey, you’re giving them too much space. Nope. Have to. I use this example a lot. So what I think of is not the perfect manager, but like an ideal manager is somebody that says, you know what, Anthony?

I. I got a special project and I want you to work on it with Susan, right? I want you to show her how to do this. You’ve done it a hundred times, but I don’t wanna keep coming to you. You can’t be the only one that we rely on. And then I need to be able to turn around and say to my boss, potentially an executive, Hey, I know you want that in 24 hours, but I need 48, and here’s why.

It’s because I need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of this opportunity to develop someone, right? And then I need to be able to distribute the workload more equitably going forward. So this is critical. So you’ve gotta gimme 48 hours and that manager has to have the confidence and the trust, right?

They need all of that emotional intelligence to be able to establish that relationship with their their boss, potentially an executive. So that there’s some faith that what the manager is asking for, right? The default is you want 48 hours. What? Why are you being lazy? No, I’m not being lazy.

I’m trying to take advantage of this opportunity. And this opportunity actually benefits the organization as a whole. So that manager really needs to be able to, in the military we call this top cover, protect the people that are under them. At all costs, right? I always say this, and we talk about this in leadership, and I’m, and I know you’ve talked about it as well, Anthony, right?

I always take the blame and I never take the credit. If I’m the manager, I always take the blame. I never take the credit. You do not get to talk smack about my people. If something went wrong, that’s my failure. You wanna talk trash about somebody, you talk about me. If something went well, they did it. I’m not here to be getting gold stars.

I’m here to take the beatings and do the translation and protect these folks so that they can be the peak performers that they ultimately wanna be in an organization. So managers play this sort of vital function of keeping the organization out of the way of production.

Yeah, it’s it’s so important that people understand that differentiation in the role that managers play.

And, also understand, I think equally that there are people that don’t want that responsibility, that they’re really happy being the technician. They’re really happy showing up every day because ultimately, whether you are. A worker, a manager, or the owner CEO, director, whatever you wanna call yourself.

You still need joy in what you do. And that’s at the heart of it. We talk particularly small business owners will have heard a lot about for various various people talking about business owner joy. And it is true that you need that and you need to be aware, even as a manager that the, that you need to have it, that the people working underneath you need to have it as well, because otherwise this whole thing doesn’t function at all.

Yeah. I don’t, I know we’ll all go to work for a paycheck and that’s fine. ’cause that’s what this wage labor exchange is all about. Now I get it. There’s work that we can be more emotionally connected to our levels of engagement or higher and work that we’re inspired by or that we see some greater benefit in.

But at the end of the day. We all wanna take advantage of these experiences to become better, right? To grow in some way. So when we show up at work, it’s not just about grinding out eight hours and stamping out widgets. There’s something needs to occur in that experience. Where I’m growing as an individual because my growth, my development, that’s what allow, that will ultimately be what allows me to continue to contribute.

And you’re absolutely right, just because somebody I. It doesn’t wanna take on a manager role. It doesn’t make ’em a bad employee, doesn’t mean we need to ostracize them. We need to celebrate them. You need senior technicians, right? That’s why you have technical leads, right? Like you take the senior most technician and you say, make sure that all the other technicians.

Have the level of skillset that we need, that they’re apprised of changes right in the way we do the work. If there’s a policy shift, something about the market, materials have changed, et cetera. So everybody is brought into how the work is being done and then the junior folks are being developed.

So you’re taking, and this is that apprentice, journeyman, master schema, right? So we always wanna have those more junior folks that are at the very front end of becoming a technician, a skilled technician. And you need those senior folks to guide them on that process and. I think you don’t wanna lose them.

The milit, the US military, sorry. I was in the US Navy. So the US military did something the US Navy did something while I was on active duty, and that was, we took the master chief, that’s the senior level of an enlisted and they split it and they said, okay, if you wanna be, if you want to continue to be a technician, you will stay in your rating.

I was a Jo. That was a public affairs person, so I could have been a Jo Master Chief, but I never would’ve been put in a command master chief role, right? I wasn’t qualified. I could only take over as the senior enlisted of let’s say a public affairs shop, a broadcasting unit, armed forces network, those sorts of things.

But if I wanted to actually be a command master chief and have insight and, contribution to how the command was run and the decisions of the command staff, then I had to declare that I would leave my rating behind. I would get a new designation as a cm. It was a CMD, so a command master chief. I went to school and then those were the billets I filled.

So I would take on a command master chief. So this is the difference between being a technician and a manager at the most senior levels. It’s funny that I don’t see enough organizations doing this very thing, creating a band for senior technicians and then saying, okay, and then these are the managers, and how do those two then interact with each other?

’cause that’s very important to figure out as well.

Yeah, and it’s interesting too, isn’t it? Because if you start thinking about it and going, management is its own own skillset. We always think of managers as being senior, but if you start thinking about managers as being a role to coordinate and do things, it’s just a different role and it’s not necessarily a question of seniority.

The seniority happens at the owner CEO level. That’s definitely a level of authority because they’re the people charged with the full responsibility and the strategy. But at those levels, if you start thinking about it differently. You understand that the roles are there to support one another?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I was 18 and I was the assistant manager of a franchise pizza chain here in the United States, and I. My job was I made pizzas but I didn’t deliver ’em. I didn’t really, I answered the phones if nobody else was around, but I didn’t usually answer the phones. But what my job was to make sure we were staffed with enough.

I. Folks every night. So I had to know volumes of, throughput over the course of the week. I had to know when our busy hours were, when our lean hours were. I had to know when we had more deliveries versus carryout. I had to have all of, so I had to have the workforce, I had to have the supplies, so I had to get the orders in and the orders incorrectly.

So we always had enough, but not so much that we had excessive waste. I had to make sure the facility was. Always clean, safe, and then up to all of the codes. So the roles that I the work that I did, the things that I spent the most of my time on were all this other stuff, back office stuff every now and then, during the heavy loads, I was out there making pizzas right, and talking to customers but the primary function wasn’t being the greatest pizza maker.

Using our analogy here, it wasn’t about being the best technician. It was about all of the things that allow all the other folks that are working in that shop to be the best that they could be, the best drivers, the best customer service, the best beat to makers. So back to your point, I think were, there was probably a clearer idea of what a manager was in the industrial age.

It was a little easier to. Place people on an assembly line and then have these rovers that were managers who were just like coming by and doing spot checks, making sure quality was there and seeing if anybody was having any issues. That, so it was more of a utility player. But I think in like a, go back to this idea of being, here in the modern age and knowledge work, it’s a little bit different because it’s not about problem solving as part of it.

But we’re actually asking for innovation. So I’m taking one of the most junior people. I had an intern a couple years ago and I said, and I was putting together, I was doing a bunch of learning and development programs for supervisors in this particular organization. So I would do this lunch and learn.

So I took my intern and I said, I want you to watch me do one of these. I am gonna walk you through how I create the content. I’m gonna give you the template, the formula, and I’m gonna show you how I present the content. You’re gonna sit through one of these, and then you are gonna go make one, and then in a couple of months you’re gonna present one.

And so I. Took him and I put him imme almost immediately. I was getting him developed ready. So to your point about managers now, I could have very easily taken that intern and said, okay, now this is how we’re gonna manage a series of contracts where we have p and l requirements for the company where we have service level agreements for our customers.

And where we have individuals that need to do the work. So to your point, I could have very easily taken a college intern and said, I’m gonna put you in a management internship and we’re gonna learn how to manage these projects, these contracts. And I think we would do very well if we recognize that managers.

Management, to your point, is a skillset, a competency, all to its own. And we started treating managers as if that competency was incredibly vital to the organization because it is.

I wanna shift gears a little bit for this last part of the podcast. If I can to talk the other side of things, which is leadership.

So we’ve talked a lot about managers. And that functionality there, and particularly this program focuses on thought leadership. What’s your definition of the idea then of leadership? If we’ve got managers performing a function that isn’t necessarily leadership? It can be what actually is the definition of leadership then?

There’s a thousand of them out there. As Anthony, my definition is leadership is a set of qualities that you bring to bear on the work that you’re performing. And it doesn’t matter if I’m the pizza guy, I can be a leader if I’m the, I’m on the soccer pitch, I can be a leader. So leadership is actually available right to everyone at every level all the time.

What leadership? I think the focus on it as an acumen or a competency that we can develop, and I don’t want to say perfect, but look for that continuous improvement is that leadership’s about creating space for others to be successful. So it’s about seeing how other people are feeling. It’s about recognizing where there are obstacles and challenges.

There’s, figuring out how to navigate difficult situations and have tough conversations and engage in productive conflict. So those are the sort of the things, the skills or the, that we or the traits of leadership. But leadership is really just about. Being, I think being thoughtful, recognizing that I am a part of a collective, however big or small that is, that everybody here is incredibly important.

So these ideas like inclusivity, celebrating diversity, championing diversity because of its absolute value to the decision making process, making sure that people are included. An example, is I’m hosting a meeting and it’s in a remote platform, like we’re doing this podcast and there’s 10 people and two people are dominating the conversation.

Or worse, we’re in a hybrid situation where there’s five people in the room and there’s another five people on a digital call. Part of leadership is recognizing there’s a distinction in that environment. And that it’s not the same experience for everybody. And so there has to be an accommodation.

And so demonstrating leadership is something as simple as Hey, Anthony hasn’t had a chance to chime in. He’s been on the call. This last however long we’ve been together. Anthony, what do you think about this? I’d really like to hear from you. And that’s bringing people in.

So leadership can be as simple as. Always making sure the door stays open till everybody’s through.

And by the way, the Be I wanna break in there and just say one of the best examples of how you can realize if you are doing that successfully or not. ’cause I observed this recently where I attended a particular meeting that’s happens on a regular basis with a regular group of people.

It’s a, and on this one particular occasion, one person who is usually quite a dominant voice. Was not able to attend and. I observed how different the dynamic was. Now that’s not a criticism of that individual. It was just more that other people were able to have a say and then the nature of the meeting was quite different without that dynamic in the room.

And I think that’s such an important thing to be aware of, is that some people by nature are a bit more dominant in a conversation and other people like to sit back and listen and you have to actively prompt them in order to get their. Opinion out. And that, as you say, I think is what leadership is about, is recognizing that you have those differentiations in a particular setting.

Yeah, and that’s such a great point because we can’t default to, Hey Anthony, what do you think? Anthony might need more time. And that’s really what we have to recognize is that, you know what, Anthony’s gonna take about 20 minutes to really get into this, and then he’ll be ready to talk. So I need to make sure that I’m mindful of how I’m navigating this conversation so that I’m not putting people off, but I’m not letting them feel excluded either.

I think at the end of the day. Leadership, if I distilled it down to just a small set of words, is leadership is helping others to see that they belong. And that my way of saying that for years has been to create space for other people to be successful. But that’s really what it comes down to, and that has to happen at every single level of an organization.

That behavior has to be modeled from the top down and the bottom up. It has to be. That is the culture that we’re trying to build in organizations. It is a leadership culture. We can talk about all the other things in inclusive culture, a diverse culture et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, what we’re really trying to build is a leadership culture where everybody is taking on the responsibility and owning the opportunity to be a contributor to making sure that everybody else feels valued.

Such an important idea. I. And what I was sitting here thinking about as well was that the extension of leadership is what we talk about here, which is thought leadership, which is exactly what you’ve demonstrated, in, in the way that we’ve talked about it. Because it is about using your experiences, thinking about I.

How those, that interpretation of all of that can have an influence on others. And that’s exactly what thought leadership is. And I, I appreciate that’s what you’ve been demonstrating here in this particular podcast. And in talking about management I. We are just about out of time, but I do want to a allow you to talk a little bit about an offer that I know you have coming up for for people who are listening into the program. ’cause I think it’s an important one for people. Again, I, I’ve kept using the word important in this episode, but I really do believe that. This is an an area that business has forgotten. Business is moving so quickly, so at the moment, the rate of change is, almost daily and leaving all of this behind is at your own peril. So talk to me about what the offer is that you’ve got.

For everything that we talked about today, Anthony I was trying to figure out a way simply to get engaged with organizations and have a very meaningful and productive conversation.

The last thing I wanna do is go in and browbeat anybody. Because just like you said, change is occurring every day. Everybody that owns a business, everybody that’s an executive, everybody that’s a director or even a manager, they know the fire that they’re under. The rate of change is accelerating in an exponential pace, and none of us can keep up.

And what I did is I created a, I just call it a manager readiness assessment. It takes maybe 15, 20 minutes to complete. It’s got a bunch of questions. But it’s designed to see, to get an organization thinking about their managers and have they done enough and are they doing enough to make sure that they can be successful because they are a critical function in the organization and it’s not designed to be the, light shining from the heavens. It’s just designed to be a trigger to be a little bit more deliberate in the thinking about, are our managers ready? And if they’re not, what impact are they having on the organization? So for all of your listeners go to my website, wal trick.com, click let’s chat. Send me a note.

Just mention that you heard this on this show. And what I’ll do is I’ll send you a link to the assessment. You complete that assessment. We’ll schedule a two hour complimentary scoping session with you and your stakeholders, and then I’ll take all of that information. I’ll wrap it up and I’ll send you back a complimentary report that’ll just give you about five things that you can do as an organization immediately without any external assistance.

You don’t have to spend a bunch of money to improve the manager experience and ultimately help you move your organization closer to the ideal of peak performance. And it does a couple of things. I’m happy to have, I love having the conversations, but I’m also, I’m interested in how we’re perceiving our organizations.

I know how I look into an organization and see it, and I’m really excited to hear how others are seeing them and experiencing. I. The organizations from inside and so yeah, reach out to me via the website. Let’s chat mention this episode. I will send you the link, complete the survey or the assessment.

We’ll schedule a session and then I will provide you a report for things that you can do to improve manager readiness in your organization without spending another dime.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. And of course, we will include all the details in the show notes. Just to wrap things up, a question that I love to ask my guests, what’s the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

I think at the end of the day, it’s that. The, we’ve put such a premium on systems, processes, technologies. That we’ve forgotten about humans and the absolute magic that humans can create if we just give them some space, some freedom and some safety to do that. I think we’re so focused on, oh my God, it’s gotta be right, and catastrophic failure, rapid pace of change and tolerance for risk and all of these things, it’s gone over the edge.

And I think what we can find is that investing broadly in workforce development will pay bigger dividends than any other investment in your organization faster, specifically if you don’t do anything else with your workforce, but you just focus on that management band and ensuring they’re ready again without spending a ton of cash, you’ll see monumental changes.

Very quickly. And it’s that moment where they realize oh, if I just give people freedom to bring their A game, by golly, we’ll do it. ’cause we’re inclined to do it. We’re not lazy as a species. We’re not, we don’t stand back on our heels. We’re not looking for the easy way out. We are predisposed as human beings to roll up our sleeves and get in there and get greasy.

And get the work done. And what stops us most of the time is some obstacle that has become. Muted or it’s invisible to us in the organization. And so we constantly look I need a new ERP, I need a new CMS, I need a piece of ai. I, and we go out and we spend so much money in organizations on things that don’t fundamentally move the needle.

They make a bit of an improvement. But they don’t make the kind of improvement that we could make in our organizations if we actually put a premium on developing those folks that have come to this opportunity, called our organization, and are willing to give their very best effort on behalf of us. And so I think that’s the moment, and I love it when I see it, and I love to celebrate it because it’s.

The, because it changes people’s lives. This is the, let me be soft and squishy for a moment, because what it does at the end of the day is those employees, they have a better experience. Their lives are improved because this work experience has been improved. It’s such a big part of our lives and we so undersell the negative impact that work can have on our mental wellness.

What a. Wonderful way to end what’s been a fascinating discussion. And I really appreciate all of the insights, jd. It’s been a absolute pleasure talking to you and I know we’re gonna have more conversations into the future, but thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites for thought leaders.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony, for having me, and I appreciate everybody listening.

And a reminder to everyone listening in all the details in the show notes about how to get in touch with jd. And of course, don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you never miss an episode of Biz Buys for thought leaders.

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