Neal Frick, the CEO of CyberCore Technologies, a government contractor that specializes in secure IT infrastructure and supply chain management, leads his company with empathy and compassion. Neal’s business results include restructuring and reducing overhead by 2.5 million, tripling headcount and revenue within 2 years, and reducing attrition from 35% to 8% within 12 months.
The author of the book, “The E Suite: Empathetic Leadership for the Next Generation of Executives,” with co-author Tina Kuhn, Neal grounds his approach to leadership in the power of empathy and investment in people, a methodology he learned from his father who is a general contractor in the insulating business. With previous corporate and government contracting roles, Neal has seen empathy leadership produce successful and profitable businesses in other sectors. His father’s leadership instilled a lifelong conviction that investing in people leads to inevitable profits.
Today Neal speaks with Dr. Karen about employee hiring and retention, responsible downsizing, leading millennials and Gen Z, the role of diversity for business success and innovation, and how to protect yourself in a cyber and AI environment.
With insights sharpened in the crucible of personal experience and professional success, Neal is on a mission to build a community of empathetic leaders.
Reach Neal Frick at theesuite.com
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Listen to the podcast here
Neal Frick, CEO Of CyberCore Technologies: The ROI For Empathy In Corporate Businesses [Episode # 471]
What if there is a profitable return on empathy in the corporate work environment? My guest will share his insights on how a culture of compassion enhances the bottom line, the value of creating a diverse executive team, and how to unlock millennial magic to attract bright young minds who will drive the future. Neal Frick is the CEO of CyberCore Technologies, a cybersecurity company that specializes in secure supply chain management. He has also held other corporate and leadership positions in retail business and government contracting.
Neal’s business results include restructuring and reducing overhead by 2.5 million, tripling headcount and revenue within two years, and reducing attrition from 35% to 8% within 12 months. The author of the book, The E-Suite, Empathetic Leadership for the New Generation of Executives. Neal grounds his approach to leadership in the power of empathy and investment in people. His father modeled this ethos when he took personal responsibility for an employee grappling with drug addiction, paying for the employee’s rehab and welcoming him back to work once sober.
His father’s actions deeply impacted Neal, instilling a lifelong conviction about the inherent value of people over profits and the understanding that investing in people leads to inevitable profits. With insights sharpened in the crucible of personal experience and professional success, Neal is on a mission to build a community of empathetic leaders. Welcome Neal to the show.
Thank you so much, Dr. Karen. I appreciate you having me on.
Neal Frick’s Father As A Model Of Empathy In Leadership
I am delighted to have you on. I love what you’re doing in terms of empathy in the workplace. It fits with my notion of positive leadership in the workplace as well. You and I really share something in common or on a similar page in that respect. I want to jump right in, Neal, and just start asking you about this backstory with your father, because he was your number one role model for empathy in the workplace. Tell us a little bit about your father’s business and a little bit more about what he did for that employee who was struggling with drug addiction.
Certainly. My father is an insulator, a general contractor and started his own business, very small, him and a few other guys. One of those employees of his over the course of their working together, developed a drug addiction and was having some pretty significant personal issues after going through a divorce. My father really valued this individual and not just his work, but also just him as a person. From a very early age, I saw what it was like when a boss takes a genuine interest at an employee and helps them through a difficult time. It would have been very easy for him to just say, “Thank you so much for your work, but this is no longer working, and move on.” Instead, he modeled a very different approach.
What ultimately happened to that employee that he helped in the workplace?
They are still working together 25 years later.
What a blessing. That’s a great testimony of the value of the empathetic approach. What other examples did you see from your father in his business? What else does he do to show empathy in the workplace where you saw that modeled for you?
I think he has a very community-centric approach to his organization. He decided to stay small, partially because he wanted to spend more time with his family. He didn’t want to get out over his skis, but partially also because I think he really appreciated the personal touch that he was able to have, not just with his team members, but also with his customers. He knows each and every one of the people that he contracts for very well and typically very closely. They were in and out of our home when I was a child. He became friends with a number of them. His approach, I found after I got into a more traditional business setting myself, was not the typical approach, and was somewhat surprised by that. I think that is how he really modeled that for me when I was younger.
How Neal Applies His Father’s Leadership Lessons Today
Let’s talk about that a little bit. How you’ve taken what you learned from your father and taking it to the next level. Talk about how your father’s example impacts, how you lead today. What are you doing as a result of seeing what he did and how have you extended it?
I think I have tried my best to live up to the example that he set in that there is serious opportunities within business, especially within the United States, to help high performers continue to be high performers. Everyone goes through significant personal issues. Not one of us has not been impacted by something terrible especially after coming out of this pandemic and seeing what terrible situations people have gone through and the impact it’s had on their work life. We let people struggle when we could extend a hand in help. I think that is something that we miss a trick on and something I try within reason to do when I am leading an organization or leading a team.
It’s challenging, I’m sure, because sometimes it may not always work out in the way that you hope it would work out. Say a little bit about that, because there are some people who are wondering is this empathy thing really profitable. Is it the way to go? To what extent do maybe some employees exploit the system rather than benefit from the empathy?
I think it’s important to define empathy in a business setting and really empathy is about understanding another person’s emotional state and contextualizing that to make decisions. It’s not sympathy and it’s not niceness. It is another avenue of information for you to gather before you make it informed decision. It can be misapplied.
What I find that nice bosses tend to misapply empathy because niceness comes from a desire to avoid conflict and make everybody like you, whereas empathy comes from a desire to understand what someone’s going through and then see if there is a reasonable way to accommodate them and make their situation better. Where I think people get that negative impression of empathetic leadership is that they see it misapplied and they see people use it to give people who are acting poorly another chance and another chance. That’s really not what it’s about.
Say a little bit more about that, about not giving another chance, another chance. How do you determine when to use empathy in a certain situation? Maybe when you’ve extended enough and it’s time to do something else. That’s a tough call for a lot of business leaders. How do you know?
It’s a bit of a gut check, I’ll give you an example. I had a high performer, someone who was incredible, did wonderful things for the organization from a revenue standpoint but ultimately was incredibly disruptive to the culture within the organization. He was going through a very tough personal time. He had a lot of demons that he was fighting. I let that go on for too long, one, because of my natural inclination to try to help a top performer continue to perform, and two, because we had built a very strong friendship. What I found was that my sympathy for him and my kindness were overriding what I knew I needed to do, which was to find an exit for him from the organization.
Empathy gave me knowledge of what he was going through, but it also gave me information about what his actions were doing to the rest of the organization. The niceness, the sympathy is what overcame that and said, “That’s not as important, and I’m going to make sure that he continues to perform well.” From my perspective, empathy is contextual. How you apply it is you have to look holistically at your organization and make sure that everyone is driving in the same direction and you’re not allowing one person to override what is fair to others.
It sounds like you’re making some decisions that have to do with the climate of the company in general. In other words, he was a person who was performing well in terms of the business metrics, however culturally they were doing some things that didn’t fit. It sounds like there are multiple buckets you have to evaluate to determine is retention the best choice in this case or are there some other options that maybe I need to consider. Maybe help us with that a little bit. When might you decide that retaining the employee is really not in the best interest of the company or other people in the company and that perhaps even with empathy in place, the better choice and decision is to help them exit, as you were saying?
I think it comes down to whether or not the individual is willing to make the changes that they need to make to offset the challenging situation. If they are causing cultural issues within an organization because they are not getting along with their peers or they’re overly aggressive in their salesmanship, if they’re willing to have a conversation around it, if they’re willing to be led and to be mentored, then I think if they’re a top performer, you owe it to them to give them an opportunity. You also need to rigidly bound that with performance metrics. If things do not improve within a certain period of time, action needs to be taken.
In the specific case that I mentioned before, I failed, frankly, in setting those performance metrics. Had I, from the beginning, used my understanding of his emotional situation through that empathetic leadership to craft a performance improvement plan that included those cultural touch points that I needed him to hit, perhaps it would have had a better outcome. I think termination and moving someone out of an organization is really your last, hopefully, your last solution. Realistically, some organizations just don’t work for certain people. Sometimes people reach the end of their lifespan within an org and everyone needs to accept that and gracefully move through it.
Recognizing And Investing In Salvageable Employees
Wonderful. I think a lot of executives out there hearing this is like, “We agree with what you’re talking about. That’s probably what we would do too.” I think the flip side and maybe some of what you’re talking about is that there are people who can be salvaged and in a lot of organizations, those people would be thrown out to pasture, so to speak, maybe prematurely. Talk a little bit about how do you tell when maybe salvaging a person is the better way to go. What are the signs that you look for to determine when to make that investment?
I find that when performance starts to drop from someone who has historically been a strong performer, or even not necessarily the strongest, but a consistent performer, and there are no changes in tools in the environmental situation within the organization and it tends to be an issue of morale or an issue of personal challenges.
What we tend to do as leaders sometimes is come into that situation with preconceptions about what the issue is. We may think it is someone who is just skating. They’re not as interested in performing anymore. We may think that their personal situation is overwhelming their professional situation and make judgments. I would recommend to leaders going in with a more open attitude and fostering an environment where people feel comfortable about mental health issues, family issues, and situations that they have going on because we all go through them.
Have a human-to-human conversation around, “What do you need to be successful here?” We’ve noticed that things aren’t going as well. If your personal situation has changed, is there something that we can do? Offer more flexibility, and change your hours. More than not, people want to be successful and they want help to be successful. If we offer that, we can salvage those people rather than pushing them out the door.
I love that because when you think about it, I mean, human resources are very valuable and it’s like, I know this is going to be a weird analogy, but let’s say you could even have an older car. Like I love older cars that you want to preserve. You could throw it out the pasture if you want to, or you could take good care of it. You can get it repaired and keep for a long time and it can still be of great service.
Sometimes we’re in a throwaway culture that doesn’t think about how can something be salvaged and utilized still, even though it may be older or it may have issues. It can still be of good service. What you’re saying is it’s almost like recycling or it’s like in that vein, how can we still get value here and build the person up to at the same time is what I hear you talking about.
I think it builds loyalty. I think it builds trust in the organization. People talk a lot about the great resignation post-COVID. They talk a lot about how the younger generation doesn’t have the same loyalty to organizations now. A lot of the reason that they don’t is because organizations don’t have the same loyalty to them. As you said, we have a throwaway culture now. If something isn’t working, we don’t expend the energy to fix it. We just say, “We’re going to get something new.”
When it comes to people, if someone wants to be successful and they have the aptitude, that is all a good leader needs. If you can take someone and give them the hard skills, you can take someone and teach them what they need. You can mentor them, you can refine their communication style, but you cannot create ambition within a person. If you have someone with good raw materials that’s not even empathetic leadership. It’s just common sense. You want to try to foster and give them an environment in which they can thrive because it helps the bottom line in the organization.
Here’s something here that makes me think about the partnership between the leader and the employee. In this sense, the employee is bringing some skills and abilities, obviously, as you’re saying, they learn on the job as well, they can be taught some things. However, there’s that motivation part where you said most people want to do well, they want to do a good job. The people you’re investing in this way, they at least have that as the core or the nucleus of their motivation. You can build around it is what I’m hearing you say. This empathy thing, it works especially if people have some internal motivation and they’re willing to do their part of whatever the fix is to get to a different place.
It is certainly a two-way street. People do have to realize that they have an obligation to themselves to better themselves, to seek out mentorship, and to grow. Not everyone is cut out for a traditional business role. That’s fine. It takes all kinds but for those who are interested and who are willing to put in that work and are willing to have those conversations around what they need without fear, which usually takes an environment where they can feel that way.
They are the ones who you want to reinvest in and make sure that you’re growing because they’re going to be the ones that will stay with your organization the longest and be the most successful. The organization I’m running now, CyberCore, we have great success with an internship program that has taken people from helping out in the IT room all the way through into software and systems engineering, where in ten years they’ve completely changed the trajectory of their career and we’ve created a program to do so. Those kinds of things are what make companies successful these days.
CyberCore’s Mission And Client Services
I love the fact that you are sharing ways that you’re building into people. You’re talking about CyberCore. Let’s deviate just a little bit. We want to talk about CyberCore for a minute and then I want to come back to some of the people things. What does your company do? Who are your clients in the sense of who do you help? How do you serve them? Tell us a little bit about cyber security.
CyberCore is a government contractor. Our primary customer is the intelligence community of the United States. A lot of the three-letter agencies. We do cyber security, infrastructure security, and supply chain security for those customers. Essentially purchasing, safeguarding the IT infrastructure, the systems that do some really cool and interesting things in the national interest safeguarding our nation’s security.
AI Challenges In Cybersecurity And Practical Cybersecurity Tips
When we think about cyber security, one of the big issues nowadays is this whole thing about artificial intelligence, AI. Recently in the news, there have been some videos that came out that were fake and that were false and given a message that those real individuals would not have wanted to put out there. Talk to us a little bit about what some of the challenges are that are new or front and center in cyberspace particularly as it relates to AI.
I think that the internet is a wonderful thing, but it’s also somewhat of a dangerous thing. Our adversaries overseas, people who want to do harm to the U.S. and really in any country, anyone’s adversaries, they look at the internet as a battleground, as a way to leverage information to sow dissent, to cause division, to push their end game forward.
AI has allowed for a lot of disinformation that would have been significantly more manpower intensive twenty years ago. To fake a video of that quality would have taken a team of individuals quite a long time. Now it’s pretty much a push of a button. I think one of the challenges we’re going to face as video and photo technology advances and artificial intelligence advances in writing and citing sources, verifying factual information is going to be really key.
I have said for a long time, don’t trust anything you read on the internet. Never have truer words been spoken than right now. This is one of the most dangerous times for information. I’m sure you see it you read an article and you go, “Is that real? It seems real.” It seems to be written by someone, but it’s entirely possible that all of the sources are created artificially. There’s no verification or validation of information. It is definitely something that we have to be very vigilant about as we move forward and keep ourselves informed.
Thank you for sharing that information. Maybe share a couple of strategies that people can use to keep safe in a cyber sense. You mentioned about verifying information. Maybe give some examples. How can they verify information? What are 1 or 2 other things they can do that would make a difference?
Some of it is obvious that never open an email from someone that you don’t know. Never even answer a phone call from someone that you don’t know. Make sure that your voicemail is set up that doesn’t give out your full name. You want to try to restrict the information that you have out in the world as much as possible. You don’t put personal identifying information out onto social media. I don’t allow connections from anyone who you do not know on social media.
There are somewhat common-sense solutions. The more nuanced ones are more complicated. There are a number of organizations out there that can safeguard your computer equipment with antivirus software and anti-spam software, but where people tend to fall into the trap more often than not is in that human-to-human communication to get you on the phone and they have this much information about you. You certainly start to feel comfortable and then all of a sudden you give them more and they have what they need to steal your identity.
They sent you an email and the name of it is a very good friend of yours, but the actual email address itself is spoofed from overseas and they’re trying to get information from you. I would just say when it comes to communication and anything that you are reading online, just take the extra step to verify. If you’re reading something that seems odd, look for other sources that are reputable, that you can trust, whatever your personal, if you’re a New York Times reader or a post reader, whatever, verify that information before you take it as truth.
Those are very good tips. I already heard a thing or two that I can change. Thank you for that information. One of the things I’ve noticed is that those who are sending the fake emails, they’ve gotten better at it than what used to be the case. In the past, it was so easy to spot them. They weren’t written very well, and there were all kinds of other telltale signs. Now you have to really be careful in order to detect that there is a fraudulent email in the inbox. Thank you for reminding us.
Especially as a government contractor, we are targeted quite often for cyber attacks. We’re certainly targeted from a lot of phishing scams as well. The most recent thing I’ve seen is a lot of Adobe e-signature documents that look very real. They look like they come from your auditor or from your CFO. You have to be very vigilant about those links because, as you said, they’re much more creative these days. With artificial intelligence, the writing is now much more cogent because it has much more to pull from. It is not people whose English is not their first language, crafting these. It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart from real legitimate emails.
Achieving Profitability Through Cost Reduction
Thank you, Neal, for keeping us all safe and what you do every day, and even what you just shared right now. I want to take a step back and go back to this whole notion of business people, business executives especially, really do care about profitability and business results and so do you. You’ve had some stellar results and I really want to unpack a few of those. One of the things I mentioned earlier is that you restructured and reduced overhead by 2.5 million. Tell us how you did that.
When I took over as CEO of Cybercore two years ago, we had experienced quite a lot of challenging times during COVID as most organizations did. It was really time for a full restructuring and reorg. Personally, my least favorite part of my job is anything to do with personnel reductions. We looked at tools, efficiencies, and redundancies. Are there individuals within the organization that if they had a new toolkit, could take on additional responsibility?
What we ended up doing was taking individuals who were overhead, and shifting them into revenue-generating positions where possible. You get that twofold of you cut your overhead costs and you increase your revenue on the back end. That really took understanding where people were and what they were willing to do and then working with them to find more efficient solutions to challenges that they were facing.
What I love about that is you didn’t just take the easy answer like so many companies do. Let’s just chop this many people, this many heads, so to speak. You’ve looked a little more deeply at where could people be redeployed. How could they be adding value to the company, which probably took a little more time? Yet at the same time, you are preserving talent and you’re using that talent in a profound way and increasing, as you said earlier, the loyalty of those personnel because they certainly know they could have been cut or they could have been chopped instead.
It took a good year, I would say, which is a little bit longer than I think most people like to take. I felt that thorough analysis, division by division, was really important. Now, don’t get me wrong, we did end up doing some layoffs as part and parcel with the reorganization, but those were very informed. They were not siloed decisions based solely on financials. We took the cultural impacts into account.
We took potential problem-solving issues into account. We took people’s personal situations into account to some degree. As a result, even though we did conduct a series of layoffs, we had no turnover as a result of it from people tend to get scared after layoffs and they move on. We didn’t experience that. I feel like our culture is stronger than it’s ever been. Our revenue continues to go up quarter after quarter.
I think the easy thing to do is to come into an organization and look at, “Purely by the numbers. Here’s the revenue. Here’s the cost. Here’s what we can eviscerate.” I’ve had consultants come in and make those recommendations. In a vacuum, yes, the next day, you go from not profitable to profitable. Six months later, a year later, your corporate team is left. Your customers are unhappy and you’re experiencing a significant amount of brain drain because you didn’t do it the right way. I think that sometimes going slower and making those more deliberate decisions are really important.
It increases and engenders the trust of your people in you. If they see you just come in with a hatchet and chop overnight and nobody understands that, that’s frightening. As you said, people will be less loyal in that situation. When they see you be careful and deliberate and make wise choices and really consider options, which engenders a greater sense of loyalty rather than the fear of I could be next tomorrow. I think transparency is also very key there.
We created a leadership team within the organization and employee-led culture committees that were empowered to make real change within the organization. We walked people through our thought process when it came to the changes that we were making. There are some things, obviously, that have to be held behind closed doors. Where we could, we shared that information, both from a solicitation of creative ways to problem solve, but also so that people knew where we were coming from and knew that we didn’t make the decisions lightly.
There was a thought process behind it, we did it for a reason, and they could see what the end game is. Often, you are in a situation where you are part of an organization, but you don’t know how you’re contributing, aside from this much of the value that you bring. When you are all driving in the same direction, it’s much easier to feel that connection, and then want naturally to stay longer and work harder.
I think that sharing the information you could share also addresses fear in an organization. When people don’t know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, and they don’t have enough information, fear increases. Of course, we already talked about trust being eroded. As that happens, they start making up their own answers for what’s going on and 9 times out of 10, those made-up answers are worse than the reality of what’s going on.
That is absolutely true. Fear thrives in darkness and the only way to really do anything about it is to bring all of it into the light. We had a situation somewhat recently. It was a cow evocative of different situations. A lot of the executive leaders had PTO at the same time. We also had a couple of new contract wins. We were not as accessible for a period of about two weeks and at the end of those two weeks we had a pretty big customer come through and walk the building and because there was a shift in our behavioral pattern, even though it was slight, all of a sudden there were these conversations around, “The company’s being acquired. Something’s up. There’s something new.”
We realized we have to be very cognizant of what we’re doing, how we’re talking, what we’re communicating. We cannot really take a couple of weeks and just do things differently. We have to be consistent because when we don’t, people start to get a little concerned. It was really instructive for us to understand the power of that transparent communication.
Scaling And Retaining Talent: Neal’s Business Results
The predictability, because if you start acting different, then they think something different is going on even if it isn’t. Very powerful concepts. You also had some other business results to Neal about tripling headcount and revenue in the two-year period of time, and you also reduced attrition from 35% to 8% in the year. That was a pretty remarkable kind of result. Share more with us about how you did some of those other pieces as well.
Those were, I think actually when I came on board CyberCore, initially I was the head of talent acquisition. My background is in recruiting and talent acquisition. We created a career path. I think we called it compass basically setting your own direction. We set up certification incentive plans, the education reimbursement programs. An internal lab where people could come and play around with technology that they hadn’t experienced before to get hands-on exposure to how things work.
We then looked at our benefits and compensation plans and said, “They need a refresh.” Hired a few individuals to come in as employee liaisons and program managers whose focus was mobility within the organization and then growing individuals. We’ve really tried to make this a place where, like 40 years ago, when you could go to a company, you could work there for 30 to 40 years and retire from it with all of these new skills and experience.
We really wanted to make it a company where you could do different things at and experience the full breadth of cybersecurity. As a result, yes, we were able to hire over 100. We had about when I started with maybe 160 people, we grew to 300 in about two years. As a result of our services business growing, we tripled that revenue and we went from close to 40% at one point attrition all the way down to single-digit attrition.
That is truly amazing because you made your workplace interesting for the employees where they could continue to grow and develop. They weren’t going to be doing the same thing all the time every day. They didn’t have to move to another company because, within the company, they had an opportunity. I think that’s brilliant. More people probably should do more of that in order to have success.
I agree. I think we have this tendency when someone’s really good at their job, we don’t want them to go anywhere because they’re so good. How are we going to replace that person? How are we going to find somebody who can do what they do? They’re going to get bored. We’re humans. We need stimulation. We need new things. They’re going to move on. It’s more risky to an organization to lose someone talented than to promote or move someone talented. It also costs us more money to hire than it does to retain. From a purely numbers standpoint, it makes sense to reinvest in your employees because they are what’s driving your customer satisfaction and they are what’s driving your profit.
Engaging Younger Leaders In The Workplace
That is the truth. This is reminding me of another area where I know you have expertise and that is in really engaging the younger people in the organization, the millennials, the ones who are going to be the leaders replacing the baby boomers and others sometime soon. What have you learned about engaging those younger leaders in the workplace? What has worked? Think about what other companies aren’t doing that makes a difference.
Something that I’ve realized, millennials and especially Gen Z and the newer generations that are entering the workplace have experienced somewhat of an unprecedented level of access to other people. All of this social media, TikTok, and all of that. They have the ability to be heard by hundreds if not thousands of people on a daily basis. There’s an expectation that they be heard but when I was growing up, children were to be seen and not heard. Now kids today and young adults today have a very different perspective. I think there’s some pushback from older generations about you’ve got to earn your place in the organization.
You have to earn your voice. Those are still valid but there’s also no harm in opening the aperture to new ideas and experiences from someone who is entering the workforce or a younger leader. Give people the opportunity to have their voices heard. Give them the opportunity to contribute. Help them understand and give them boundaries so that they can be successful but don’t say, “Be quiet and color for six years,” and then you can start to have an opinion. The world has changed a little bit. They’re very used to being heard. I think we can foster that. We can boundary it, but we can foster it.
I think it’s so huge. I’m thinking now this is a long time ago, but many years ago when I was on active duty in the army and one of my assignments was with the cadets at West Point. In the summer, we ran a mental health operation for a cadet basic training and I had first-class cadets in essence by direct reports. Now the way offices led at the time would be simply to just tell them what to do and that was it. I said, “Look, these guys are about to graduate out of the academy. They’re going to be leading people in real life and they need to exercise their brains and thinking through tough decisions because we have very tough decisions every day.”
In our morning case conference meeting every day, I would solicit. “What would you do here? How would you handle this?” While I’m there to be the mentor and also help them see what they wouldn’t see, they’re also stretching their brains and learning how to analyze and make tough decisions as leaders. If you don’t practice, then you’re not going to be good when you first get out there and you could have been practicing under safer conditions. I think it’s important.
It’s teaching critical reasoning and critical thinking skills. It’s helping to expand their confidence, which is incredibly important. The reality with the exception of the military or organizations that are doing active health care, there’s not a lot of risk in letting someone fail. Obviously, in certain organizations, there is some risk. In most businesses, failure is not a terrible thing, especially if it’s a boundary. I think back to when I was young in my recruiting career, I had a lot of ideas about what would work. I learned over time what did and what didn’t. I see young recruiters coming in with a lot of similar ideas to what I had when I was younger and my inclination is to shortcut it and tell them, “Here’s why that’s not going to work.”
Sometimes if there’s a cost investment that’s what I’m going to do because I’m not going to spend the money but if there’s no cost investment or there’s not a lot of risks, I’m going to let them find out on their own and then help build them up afterwards and reinforce that I did the exact same thing. The reason I got that question was, “Why did you let me do it?” “First of all, it’s been twenty years since I was a recruiter. Things might’ve changed. Second of all, that’s how I learned. That’s how I got to where I am is because I fell on my face and then I got back up.”
That’s really important. Really being willing to let people learn from mistakes because it’s all part of the process along the way. I also think we can help them by asking some really good questions that are open-ended and it’s based on the experiences and knowledge that we have. Questions they may not have thought about and we might say, “What are your plans or what would you do if in implementing this X, Y, and Z happens?” At least they’re thinking about it and they’re coming up with a pathway forward if X, Y, and Z happens. They might not have even considered that X, Y, or Z could happen. I think that’s an excellent way to go to.
There’s no harm in listening to someone’s suggestion or opinion. Even if they’re not right, that’s okay. You have then an opportunity to have an educational conversation around why it won’t work. If you’re a transparent leader, it gives you teaching opportunities every single day but it takes maybe two minutes to lend an ear. The trust that you build with that person when they see that you are trying to help them and that you’re really giving them a chance to express themselves, it’s enormous.
It’s why a lot of companies are having significant attrition issues with millennials and Gen Zers is because they’re applying archaic business practices that they’re just not tolerating. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. We need talented workers. We need to grow them. We need to advance their careers because we’re not going to be around forever. We need to be able to pass the torch to a generation that has critical thinking skills, that has critical reasoning skills, and can do what we do because that’s the legacy that we should leave behind.
Anything else about the millennials or the Gen Zers or younger generation you haven’t mentioned yet that you think other executives really need to think about?
I think the only other thing I would say is I hear a lot of these younger generations have a lot of entitlement issues. They think they deserve something. I would challenge executives, because it’s something I go through myself, to ask yourself why you think you didn’t deserve that when you were younger. Looking back, you probably did. You probably did deserve a voice at the table. You probably did deserve fair and equitable wages. You probably did deserve a second chance if you made a mistake.
Just because we were brought up in certain environments, just because we were taught a certain way, doesn’t necessarily mean it was right. Now I will caveat that with, yes, sometimes there are entitlement issues and sometimes that can be frustrating. I’m not invalidating that, but I would just challenge people to be a little bit more open because I think there are things that we can learn from this generation. Their connectivity and their knowledge of how other people and other organizations do things have given them a wider worldview than we had at their age.
The Power Of Diversity In The Success Of Organizations
That’s great. I’m so glad you talked about that. Neal, I also know that you are very committed to diversity and to the power of diversity in the success of organizations. When you came to your company, you had an executive team of six white males. Tell us what you did to transform that team and what’s been the result.
I will say it was made up of men and women, but yes, it was. We were all, all Whites. First, as part of the reorganization, we reduced our executive team, but then we eliminated it. Instead, I opened it up to a leadership team that I think is more representative of the world at large. Men, women, and people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and socioeconomic classes. Personally, I want to see the organization that I work for represent the world around me.
People of different races, colors, genders. It’s important to me that the company is more reflective of my worldview. I’m also really interested in diversity of thought. People who are raised differently, who think differently, who problem solve differently, because that really lends to creative solutions to problems that organizations miss out on when they homogenize their culture. People talk about fitting into an organization’s culture and I would challenge people to look for individuals that expand your organization’s culture.
From what I’m hearing, making the team broader and more diverse, it’s actually led to some unique thinking and the ability to solve tougher challenges is what I’m hearing.
I will say that I think people who are part of marginalized groups have had to work harder and work differently in front of obstacles that people who look like me do not have. Whether people agree with that or not, I think it’s inarguable that they have to approach things differently. That gives you a different set of tools for solving a problem. That is critical to an organization. You need to be able to attack something from all sides. If you have 5 or 6 people who are all coming from the exact same background, you’re only going to have one solution to that problem.
Neal’s Book: The E-Suite And Its Leadership Insights
That’s just well-stated and well-said. I know your company has the profitability results to talk about the value of becoming more diverse in today’s world. Neal, tell us a little bit about your book, The E-Suite, Empathetic Leadership for the New Generation of Executives. What’s in there that we haven’t talked about yet, let’s say, and who did you write it for? If somebody reads it, what are they going to get out of it?
It is a labor of love between myself and a coworker, a previous boss of mine, Tina Kuhn, who’s my co-author. We wrote it because we realized that while we had very different approaches to problem-solving, they were both rooted in this people-first empathetic leadership. In the book are practical solutions to commonplace business problems, everything from tactical issues of how do you recruit and retain? How do you sell? How do you market, and all wrapped up in that people-based empathetic leadership approach?
There’s also how do you transformationally change an organization but maintain some level of sanity during it. How do you make sure that your team stays on board? How do you manage difficult people? How do you have confrontational conversations while still maintaining everyone’s dignity and making sure that you are communicating effectively, knowing as much as you can by leveraging that empathy? There are a lot of really practical frontline solutions. I would say it’s for anyone who wants to learn how to connect more deeply with their employees to make a positive change. Anybody who wants to connect more with their customers and anybody who wants their companies to experience revenue growth.
That’s a lot of people.
Exactly.
That sounds like a great book. How can people find out more about you and get the book?
The book is available on Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. The website is TheESuite.com. Me personally, I’m on Instagram @TheAnxiousCEOOne. I use that moniker because I talk a lot about mental health. I’m an anxious person and on Medium @Neal.Frick, where I write more short-form articles about mental health and leadership, business ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Final Words Of Wisdom For Corporate Executives
You have quite an influence on a wide swath of subjects that you are covering. I’m glad you’re sharing that with people so that they can go to those sites and learn more. Neal, what additional words of wisdom do you want to leave for my community of corporate executives? Maybe something you haven’t said just yet.
I would say that it takes less time than you think and it takes no money to have a conversation with someone and understand where they’re coming from. It really is not that difficult to operate empathetically. Although people think of it as a softer skill. There is real evidence around the power of it in growing your business. The first thing that you have to do is you have to put your ego aside because you’re going to have to have conversations with people who have different viewpoints than you do, who think differently, who approach things differently, who have different opinions.
If you allow them, they’re going to challenge you. That will help you grow as a leader, it’ll help them grow as an employee, it’ll set them up for leadership. Depending on the industry that you work in, businesses tend to be a very ego-focused area because it’s very about what I can contribute. As your leader, it’s about how I can change an organization. Open that aperture, let more people in, grow your community, diversify your community, and you will see results.
That’s wonderful guidance. What it reminds me of is the two-way process of learning. Just because you may be the executive doesn’t mean you cannot learn from the millennial or the Gen Z or whoever else is in the workplace. I think if everyone has that learner’s mind and attitude, the company is going to grow and be more successful rather than to think it’s just a one-way street. It’s in both directions is really what you’re talking about, Neal.
Absolutely. I am a firm believer that no one is an expert. They say 10,000 hours and anything makes you an expert. I don’t believe that. If you are truly an expert and you have nothing left to learn, then in my opinion, move on to something new because if you’re not learning, what are you doing? There’s always, especially when it comes to our businesses, as the world evolves, we have to evolve. Listen to someone who is maybe not someone that you would typically take advice from. If it doesn’t resonate, throw it away, but give someone the opportunity in the same way that you are trying to teach and mentor, give them an opportunity to teach you something as well.
Thank you so much, Neal. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing so much wisdom that’s practical and that people can use today and really marrying empathy with the profitability of the company because they do both go together.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed our conversation.
Leadership Wisdom From First Kings
Me too. Thank you again. To everyone out there in our conversation with some scriptures that come from First Kings, the 12th chapter. This is the situation where a rare poem who was the son of King Solomon is now taken over as King because his father has died. He has an opportunity to lead the Northern tribes as well as the Southern tribes if he makes the right empathetic choice. What we’re going to read is what really happened, what he decided, and a little bit about what happened. In First Kings, the 12th chapter, and it starts off by saying, “And Rehoboam went to Shechem for all Israel had gone to Shechem to make him King.”
It happened when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat heard it, he was still in Egypt for he had fled from the presence of King Solomon and had been dwelling in Egypt. Keep in mind. Jeroboam is the de facto leader of the northern tribes, but he’s in exile in Egypt until Solomon dies. Now that he hears a Rehoboam, Solomon’s son in place, he comes back on the scene. Here’s where we picked that up and then he says, “That they sent and called him then Jeroboam and the whole assembly of Israel came and spoke to Rehoboam saying your father made our yoke heavy.
Now, therefore, lighten the burdensome service of your father and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you.” He said to them, depart for three days, then come back to me, and the people departed. King Rehoboam consulted the elders who stood before his father Solomon while he still lived and he said, “How do you advise me to answer these people?” They spoke to him, saying, “If you will be a servant to these people today, and serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be your servants forever.”
He rejected the advice which the elders had given him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him who stood before him, and he said to them, “What advice do you give? How should we answer this people who have spoken to me, saying, lighten the yoke which your father put on us?” The young men who had grown up with him spoke to him, saying, “Thus you should speak to these people who have spoken to you saying your father made our yoke heavy but you make it lighter on us.”
That’s you say to them, “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s waist.” Now whereas my father put a heavy yoke on you I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges. Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam on the third day as the king had directed saying, “Come back to me the third day.” The king answered the people roughly and rejected the advice which the elders had given him.
He spoke to them according to the advice of the young men saying, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges.” Now you can read the rest of this, but what do you think those people did? The people from the Northern kingdom ran away and said, “Forget it. We’re not serving you.” At that time, Rehoboam ended up being only in charge of the house of David and the Southern part of the kingdom. He lost the ten Northern tribes.
This choice of whether you choose empathetic leadership or harsh scourge leadership makes a difference in terms of the success of your organization, the success in this case of the kingdom that Rehoboam was in charge of. I think that Neal has done a great job of sharing with us the business benefit of empathy and how it leads to loyal employees and increases trust in the organization and profitability. The choice is yours. Decide for empathy and the success of your people and your company. See you next time.
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Combating Loneliness And Depression: Dr. Clarence Shuler’s Insights
In some parts of the world, including the United States, loneliness, depression, and suicide are at an all-time high. With me is Dr. Clarence Shuler, President and CEO of Building Lasting Relationships. He personally experienced a bout of depression. Dr. Shuler, tell us a little bit about what you learned in your experience and what resources you have available for us.
Mental health is a really big thing in America today like you said, and African American men are the number one depressed group in America. I think men in general would come into that. When I went through my depression, it was really a thing about ideology. I hate to say that, but I was trying to validate myself by how much money I made or my success. I was fortunate enough to have a Christian counselor, Dr. Monique Gadsden who helped me work through that.
Now I’m managing my depression more effectively. One of the resources that we have is our book, Finding Hope in a Dark Place: Facing Loneliness, Depression, and Anxiety with the Power of Grace. I hope you will use it as a resource just to see where you are emotionally. It’s not a sin to be depressed. I just want to encourage you and give you hope that your depression can be coming into control.
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Shuler. What I want everyone to know, as he already said, this is a book that was co-written with his counselor. It is the real deal. If you want to know more about the book or more about services that are available to deal with depression and loneliness, go to Dr.ClarenceShuler.com.
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The Mission For Family Discipleship At Victorious Family
I’m here with Terence Chatmon, who is the president and CEO of the non-profit organization Victorious Family. They are committed to family discipleship and transformation. Thank you for being here, Terence. Tell us about your big goal. What it is that you’re going for at Victorious Family.
By 2030, we see reaching 9.2 million families here in the U.S.
That is wonderful. You’re reaching these families because you really want to see children grow up and truly continue their faith in Christ. Tell us about one of your resources. Do your children believe the book you’ve written?
Ephesians 6:4 says, “Fathers don’t exasperate your children, but to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” We’re just being faithful to that calling. In order to do that, we train coaches and we provide workshops and content to train parents on how to discipline their children.
That is phenomenal. How can people find out more about the ministry and the other tools and resources you have available and also how they can donate to support the ministry?
One of those tools is Do Your Children Believe, a book that we’ve published by Thomas Nelson. You can find that at VictoriousFamily.org.
There you have it. You want your family to be victorious? Go to VictoriousFamily.org.
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Spirit Wings Kids Foundation’s Global Impact And Permaculture Farm
This is Dr. Karen here, and I want to share some important insights with you about Spirit Wings Kids Foundation, a 501c3 organization that’s doing wonders across the globe and especially in Uganda. I have with me Donna Johnson, who’s the founder of Spirit Wings Kids and a member of the board. She’s going to tell us about the permaculture farm that they have started. Donna, tell us all about it.
Thank you, Dr. Karen. For decades, we’ve been supporting the orphanage and family network in Uganda. In 2018, my son is a permaculturist, and we had acres that we dedicated to his planting. It was just amazing. He also taught them how to do permaculture. It’s flourishing. In fact, during the pandemic, it saved lives. 203 families were fed during the pandemic. It’s such a miracle that God just called us to plant that garden at the time that we did.
Thank you so much, Donna. Thank you so much for your work in Uganda. A couple of other things I want people to know, as a permaculture farm is self-contained in many ways, depending on how they’re growing the crops. You don’t have to use pest control. You don’t need fertilizer. It’s a very sustainable way to provide food for the community. That’s a blessing. If you want to be a part of this wonderful work out there, 100% of all of your donations goes to the people in Uganda to help feed them and their families. Go to SWKids.Foundation and give, make a difference in the world. Thank you for doing so.
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