Episode 326: Paul Batz, CEO, Good Leadership (replay)

Welcome to Motivated to Lead Podcast, helping you become a better leader. I'm your host, Mark Lingsheim. Hi, everyone. Thanks again for joining us for our podcast this week.

My name is Mark Lingsheim with SEMO Partners. Each week, we interview leaders and they share lessons learned from their careers. Our goal is to help you become a better leader. If you're new to our podcast, welcome.

I encourage you to go back and listen to some of our previous guests. We've had some great guests over the last several years. And if you haven't, I encourage you to subscribe. This week, we're going to revisit a conversation that we had with Paul Botts.

Paul is an executive coach. He is the CEO and founder of Good Leadership. And he has some great thoughts that he's going to share around leadership and lessons that he's learned in his career. looking forward to today's conversation with Paul.

Well, Paul, I guess first off, can you give us just a little bit of your background, a little bit of your career story? Well, first of all, when you go to the high school career fair, there's no booth for executive coaching. It's one of those things that you discover. And so my path is that I understood at a very early age, I was working at a grocery store.

And part of the job of bagging groceries is that every once in a while you have to work the outside. That's where people come up in their car and you put the groceries in their car. Well, one of my buddies showed up with his mom and I put groceries in his car and he gave me such an interesting look. And I thought to myself, I hate this job and I need to do something differently.

And so that week I learned about one of my parents' friends who needed their house painted. So I called up one of my buddies and said, hey, I think we could make money painting houses instead of bagging groceries. And he was working at a gas station. So we started painting houses and that turned out to be profitable and fun and outside.

And I learned at that stage, I loved working for myself way more than I loved working for the grocery store. And that kind of set off my entrepreneurial journey. I had that business all the way through college. I sold it to a couple other kids that came from behind me.

I put myself through college, basically painting houses. And I got started into an entrepreneurial firm. I was the third employee hired. It was in the PR and advertising world.

And what I learned is that negotiating contracts with all those mostly housewives who needed their house painted was a skill that I had. And I was almost instantly better at it than the founder of the firm. And so I've been on the front end of professional services my entire life. I started in PR and advertising, which is basically the sociological sciences.

It's how do you move the masses towards what you want them to do. And then I became a partner at the firm Padilla, Padilla Spear Beardsley. And John Beardsley, the CEO there, really, really changed my life. It was the late 1990s.

And I was a partner in the firm. I was in charge of business development. And that was when companies like Medtronic and big companies in Minnesota were spinning off ideas into the IPO market, initial public offering market. That was before Sarbanes-Oxley made it much harder.

And our firm, Padilla, had a New York office. And so over a period of about three years, we had almost 100 companies go public through Padilla. And a lot of them asked us to take fees, take stock in exchange for fees, because they didn't have any money. They said they didn't have any money.

So we learned that the ones who spent time making sure they were aligned and committed and accountable to one another. Usually it was a three-person team. If they spent time getting their act together, they would come back from New York with a higher valuation and therefore Padilla would make more money. Beardsley changed my life when he said, we're not doing a fee-for-stock deal ever again unless they spend a three-day workshop with bots.

And at the moment, I didn't realize that I was no longer in PR. I was actually in organizational effectiveness, organizational development, and executive coaching. So one of our clients at the time was a firm that did industrial organizational psychology. She hired me away.

I ran that firm for seven years. It was a wonderful time right up until the Great Recession. And I started Good Leadership Enterprises on November 1st, 2009. I sold out of my partnership in the other firm.

My wife and I, together with two kids in college, started at what seemed like a horrible time. However, it turned out to be a blessing and one of the things that I'm the most grateful for. We have a very positive message at Good Leadership. We believe goodness pays.

And we believe that you can grow on your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friends, your fun and future. We call it the 7Fs. We think if you're in the right place in a career standpoint, you can grow on your 7Fs and you can actually spread goodness as much at work as you can at home. and the world was ready to hear that message.

We had an extremely successful first year. We attracted other freelance coaches who lost their jobs and wanted to become executive coaches. We taught them how to do that. And most of those coaches are still with us today.

Today, we have 17 coaches around the country and we work with executive teams in high growth organizations and we coach around the idea that goodness pays. So that's my story. Great. So if you were able to spend back time and talk to a 22-year-old Paul, what advice would you give him?

Well, it's interesting. I find that question to be fascinating. I'm glad you gave that to me in advance. I think there are three things that I would say to 22-year-old Paul.

Number one, the world is set up for people who are not like entrepreneurs of today. You're told you need to retire by a certain number with a certain number in your bank account. And the more you focus on that I think the narrower your life gets I made very little money in my first job But my experiences that I gained were significant So that the second message The second message to 22 Paul would be is that as long as you learn from every hour of every day in the first decade of your career, you're going to find the time where you're going to leapfrog people, which is exactly what happened to me.

And then And the third thing is, you know, really understand who you are and what's going to make you happy for the remainder of your life. And when we actually committed to this idea that goodness pays, I had equally as many people look at me and say, what the heck are you talking about? And others would say, oh, my God, what a refreshing message. Tell me more and how can I help you?

so I do think most people today cannot live by the conventional ideas that you're taught in your 20s I think that as long as you learn from every encounter and you store it all away that's really powerful and then the third thing is you know figure out as fast as you can what do you who are you and what do you stand for I have to give a lot of credit to my one of my mentors Richard Leiter, who's the purpose guy. He really helped me at a time when I really needed it, zero in on who am I and what do I stand for?

And I'm grateful for that. Any advice that you received early on that you should have ignored? Yeah. I stayed at my first job too long.

I was raised, you know, we were having children and I was basically led to believe that a steady job was stability. And what I know now is that that was not stability. There were a lot of other things I could have done that seemed more risky that would have provided a lot more to my family. Now, I learned a lot from the School of Hard Knocks and I have no complaints.

I have a wonderful life today. But yeah, I think staying the course was not a smart move looking back. So you coach a lot of leaders and people that they're maybe moving into new leadership roles as a new CEO. What advice do you give them as they're leading either their first team or taking over as kind of a leader of an organization?

It's beautiful because I take on seven to 10 new CEOs a year. And actually, what's interesting is I had five first-time CEOs who got their first CEO job during COVID that I'm coaching. So the number one message is this, beware the superhero syndrome. The superhero syndrome begins when a new CEO takes over and says, I'm going to lead by example.

What they mean is that they're going to create a higher standard of accountability. They're going to work longer and harder. And what it does is it sets up a self-defeating cycle where people sit back and say, okay, well, if you're going to do all my work for me, or if you're going to make all the hard decisions, or you're going to second guess everything I'm doing, then I'm just going to let you do it. and you get exactly the opposite of what you want.

You want engagement, you want empowerment, you want people who are committed to ideas and have each other's backs. Well, most CEOs that I've coached have gone through the superhero syndrome and they get exhausted and they get tired of things when the job becomes frustrating. So coaches, we ask a lot of questions. And so eventually four or five months into it, I'll say, Hey, what's frustrating you these days?

and if they've got a long list, that's a signal that they bought into the superhero syndrome. And so we have to say, well, what role do you play in that frustration? And how is it that you maybe have your fingers in too deep in certain things where you're actually creating that frustration? And so those are very, it's a powerful concept.

I write about it all the time. I speak about superhero syndrome all the time. and it doesn't fit into a high-performing team. So as you're thinking about, you mentioned that's one pitfall that a leader will fall into.

What are one or two other things that you see common mistakes that new leaders make? Well, we've certainly learned this through COVID, that self-care has to be job number one. I see an entire generation of people asking the question, at what cost? I mean, anyone can work longer and harder to get better results.

But we're starting to see that if it's not adding joy to your life, I mean, my job as a coach is to help our CEOs find the part of their work where it's actually adding years to their life. Because the conventional wisdom, if you get the big CEO job, you know what? You got to be prepared for the fact that it might take years off your life. And that's just a self-defeating idea that I don't think we have to buy into.

And if you're a good leader and you empower other people and you help stimulate all the joy and positivity in their lives, well, then it comes back to you. The best CEOs I know, the job is adding years to their life because they're multiplying the basic joys of living that also happen to happen at work as well. So I think that's something that I think is really, really important is self-care and trying to create an environment at work that's light, easy, and joyful. That produces much better results than the other way around.

I know you do a lot of work around teamwork and putting together better teams. Talk a little bit about that, just a few kind of high-level concepts that you think would be helpful. Yeah. So let's go all the way back to 2010 when I started this firm in the recession.

I met some beautiful people who'd lost their jobs, who were laid off, who did organizational effectiveness work. And that allowed us to sit around a table and dream. They were all on severance package. I didn have a severance package because I quit my job and started my own firm But we got to dream about what was it that we had seen that made some teams just so amazingly powerful and others just in it unable to align.

And we landed on this, this theory that I write a lot about. We have a new book coming out. It's called good leadership as a team sport. And it's all about this theory that we use to coach teams.

And it's called epoxy theory. We all know that epoxy are two chemicals that don't do anything by themselves, but you put them together in equal amounts and they create the strongest bond. So what we've discovered through our research is that there is a relational capital is one of those compounds and structural integrity is another. So the relational capital is to the degree that people actually care about each other.

And you could say like each other, both personally and professionally. That has to be present in a high-performing team these days. And then structural integrity is how well is this team actually set up to succeed? It's about role clarity and planning and problem-solving processes where people do them together, not the superhero way, right?

So when you have equal amounts of relational integrity, structural integrity, and relational capital, you get the highest performing teams. And so we've figured out how to measure how well those teams are set up to succeed with the simple 24-question survey that we've had hundreds and hundreds of reps on now for 10 years. And so when we engage teams, they just aren't clicking. We hear that word a lot.

We've got a good thing. We've got a good plan, but we're just not clicking. So what we do is we assess then, are they overly relational or overly structural? And how do we find people on the team that have those natural skills and interests and abilities and get it so there's an equal voice around the table.

So everybody can bring their gifts and skills in the context of relational and structural. And when we do that, it's amazing how quickly we can turn it around. And when we get that done, then people actually want to be accountable, which is what every CEO wants, right? You want accountability, but there's a whole bunch of things that have to line up in order to get it.

So that's how we think about it. So you've gotten into an organization, you're now leading either a team or the whole organization, and you find out that the culture isn't what is going to be successful as far as in the long term. What are some practical things you can do to help change a culture? Or is that an impossible thing to do?

It's beautiful. It's a great, great question. We have met leaders in organizations who say they can't change their culture. And then what we do is ask, well, then why are you leading?

I mean, culture is the sum total of what gets rewarded and punished. That's it. So if you're complaining about your culture, you're obviously punishing things that are good. And we got to figure out why are you doing that and figure out what are the practical examples.

And one of the things we've just noticed in our practice, we were just talking about it this morning on a team call, that most of our clients have some sort of a mantra that they run their culture by. At Good Leadership, our cultural mantra is intensely casual, and it means something to our people. But we hear work hard, play hard a lot. And we have two client organizations now, actually three as of this morning, who are telling us that the play hard is gone now, that their productivity has gone way up during COVID because we're using Zoom and things like that.

But the sense that there's playfulness and that you can get some play hard at work is evaporating or already gone. And so we're using a bunch of exercises around goodness. We're using exercises around the seven Fs that we talked about earlier to help people find the fun in the work again, find the joy in the relationships in the workplace. And we just really believe that goodness pays and what we concentrate on grows.

So if you believe in those two ideas, then you can go to the third step, which says what we look for, we find. So we will engage managers and ask them, what's missing in your culture? They'll tell us and then we'll say, is it possible that it's already there, but you're not seeing it? If you start seeing it and rewarding it, it'll be remarkable how much six months from now people will tell us that your culture is coming back.

but the idea is that you have to reward the right things and punish the wrong things. That's how you change your culture. There's no other way to do it. And so leaders have to be actively engaged and believe that they can change the culture.

And luckily, you know, when we choose clients and we get engaged with them, we can tell pretty quickly whether or not they buy into this. So you've written several books and great people to pick up. Are there other books that you recommend to leaders that you put on their reading list? Yeah, you know, I think there are some classics.

I always remind people that I think Built to Last and Good to Great are some of the best publications that were ever written for business people to read about culture and leadership. But interpersonally, so for your own personal growth, there's a couple that I recommend all the time in our coaching practice. One of them is called Halftime. Halftime by Bob Buford.

It really changed my life. There was a time when I could tell that my career had stalled and I was not feeling like I was getting ahead in my life and I confided in somebody who gave me his copy of Halftime. I devoured it and it changed my perspective on life. And it caused me then to read something that I read in my early 20s that I had no idea what I was doing.

And that is Napoleon Hill's classic, Think and Grow Rich. When I read that at age 46 when I had decided to start my own firm. It meant something to me and it was deeply moving Beyond that there a couple others that I think are awesome One of them is The Alchemist My son gave me his copy of The Alchemist and said Dad I read this It was recommended to me He was in his mid-20s when he gave it to me. And that book had a powerful impact on just my sense of spirituality and also how I want to show up as a leader.

and then there's another one that's very uncanny but it's a book called Chasing Daylight by a guy named Eugene O'Kelly. He was the CEO of KPMG worldwide when he had a disease that was shutting down all of his non-voluntary motor systems. He was given a couple hundred days to live. And he and his wife unraveled his life in a way that is wonderful.

They built a strategic plan together. They executed it spectacularly well. And I happened to be his age when I read that book. And so those are some of the things that I recommend a lot.

And I'm glad you asked. It was good to kind of spark those memories. Yeah. So outside of work, what do you do to recharge?

I have a lot of hobbies. I love to play golf. I have a workshop, a woodworking shop. I come from a long line of artisans and hand workers.

So I love to do those things. My wife and I love to host. We're very social people. We have five or six circles of friends and we're proud.

We do a couple of dinner parties every month. We figured even how to do that in the garage during COVID. And, you know, we're very social people. We also like the arts and concerts.

And I suppose if you looked at our checkbook, we go out to eat a lot. But those things all recharge me, including Sunday afternoon on the couch watching, you know, NFL. Or this week, it'll be the Masters. So, yeah, absolutely.

Well, what parting advice would you give to a new or up-and-coming leader? it's progress not perfection i mean if you are sincere and willing to be transparent about your motivations and your goals it is amazing how much people will help you achieve your goals if you're willing to talk about them they we're often willing to talk about our short-term business goals but we recommend that people think with an aspirational framework. And it's a combination of things that I've mentioned before here, but in all of our work, when we start anything, we ask everybody that we're coaching, including an executive team to think through their lives to an aspirational framework of 20 years from now, seven years from now, three years from now, and then the most important priorities this year.

So 27, three, one. So I turned 59 last week. I have a 20 year plan. And it's, it's a plan that I, I, in some ways I can't wait for time to go faster because I've got cool goals.

And the most important goals that we think are the ones you set for yourself seven years from now. So I've got a very rich, vivid picture of how I want to live the next seven years, which will end up at 66, which most people are thinking about slowing down and receding. I got a whole nother set of plans from 66 to 73. And then if you can get it down into three years, and we like to call these breakthrough goals.

These are stimulating goals that you don't even know how you're going to do it, but just thinking about it and focusing on it actually makes you feel better and gives you a sense of momentum in your life. And then you can share, if you can share those goals and the things you're working on right now, people will go out of their way to help you become the person you want to be. You just have to have the courage and also the foresight to get specific about these goals. So one person said to me, I want to set foot on all seven continents.

And I said, by when? And they said, huh, I hadn't really thought about that. I said, well, that's high intensity travel, dude. And you probably better go to Antarctica first.

And the only way you can get there is on a ship. And you realize that you got to spend like 14 days on a ship to get to Antarctica. And he's like, huh. And so get specific with your goals because people will literally weigh in and help you.

And that's whether it's personal goals or professional goals. That's the advice that I would give to anyone who's listening today. Great. So how would somebody learn more about your work and your books?

Well, our website is goodleadership.com. I have a blog there that there are several thousand readers every Tuesday. And we also have a, for listeners who might be anywhere near Minneapolis, St.

Paul, or come through on business, we have a breakfast series called the Good Leadership Breakfast Series that we started in January of 2010. I didn't really intend for it to be something that would keep going. But in November of this year will be our 100th episode of the Good Leadership Breakfast. We've had over 30,000 guests.

We host between 200 and 250 people six times a year on Friday mornings. And so you can find information about that on goodleadership.com. Those are probably the best ways.

Great. Well, Paul, this has been a lot of fun. You've had some great, great insights you've shared, and I know it's going to be helpful for our listeners and I wish you continued success in your 20 year plan. And it's been great to connect with you.

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the motivated to lead podcast. Please subscribe on iTunes. You can also see a video version of this interview at motivated to lead.

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