What Influence Really Looks Like for Leaders
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“Get out of the office and tell people you give a damn.” – Brad Englert
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author and technologist Brad Englert on how we can understand and leverage our spheres of influence at work.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is an author, advisor, and technologist. Brad is the founder of Brad Englert Advisory which provide state-of-the-art IT consulting. He’s previously from Accenture where he worked for 22 years, including 10 years as a partner and then served The University of Texas at Austin for eight years, including seven years as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). He’s got himself an Amazon best-seller book – Spheres of Influence: How to Create & Nurture Authentic Business Relationships
Connect with Brad and learn more about his work…
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Influence is relational, not positional.
Field promotions build confidence and reduce imposter syndrome.
Culture can be changed through consistent communication and replacing misaligned leaders.
Influence requires deeply understanding others’ goals.
Authentic influence demands genuine care.
Cadence creates influence.
Haters can become advocates through consistent behavior.
Influence requires being visible and accessible.
Ethics are a non-negotiable influence guardrail.
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Brad Englert, and here is why he is awesome. He’s an author, advisor, and technologist. He’s the founder of Brad Englert Advisory, which provides state-of-the-art IT consulting. He’s previously from Accenture where he worked for 22 years, including 10 years as a partner, and then served the University of Texas at Austin for eight years.
It’s just a run on sentence. The man’s done so much. He’s done that, uh, including seven years as the Chief Information Officer. He also has a book that I suggest you check out. All about influence, specifically called Spheres of Influence, How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships.
That’s an Amazon bestseller, and he’s here today. Hi Brad.
Brad Englert: Thanks for inviting me.
Russel Lolacher: Thanks for being here, sir. Um, influence. It’s a funny thing. I have thoughts, but we’re getting into all those things. Uh, I first have to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, sir, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Brad Englert: Well, I was with the firm for 22 years and they really valued mentoring and coaching and ongoing training, but the thing that helped me the most was, uh, field promotions. So when I was a senior consultant, they would give me a field promotion to manager. So I got to be in a manager role even though I was not a manager.
I got to be, uh, in associate partner role when I was a senior manager. Even though I wasn’t an associate partner. I got to be in a partner role when I was an associate partner and it really helped cure a imposter syndrome. So the cure is you actually try it out and in a lower risk situation, and if you can prove you can do it, then when you get promoted, you don’t have to worry, nor does your boss have to worry, whether you’ll be successful or not.
Russel Lolacher: I love that the idea that you get a taste of what the bigger picture might look like and the responsibility and the accountability of it might look like. While also, to your point, risk aversion organizations might still be okay with things like this because there is that safety net of don’t worry, we’ve got you.
Brad Englert: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly.
Russel Lolacher: How have you brought that into your own… i, I, I know you’ve worked at a few large organizations. How have you brought then into your own leadership thoughts like that?
Brad Englert: Well, I’ve always enjoyed, uh, helping people grow in their career, and that was part of the culture of the firm. And when I got to the university, it was, uh, it a big, big organization. 54,000 students, 4,000 faculty, 21,000 staff. And I inherited a culture that was kind of a, we’re rewarding heroics and fire drills.
And that’s the opposite of my point of view. I’d like, uh, proactive customer service. So I had to work really hard over, it took a little bit about a year to change that culture into, uh, customer service versus, uh, heroics.
Russel Lolacher: I like, I know there’s probably a few people listening. You’re like, it took me a year. Like it, that’s no time at all. Like, it’s usually truthfully like change management. I’ve heard what the average is about seven to eight years to get a culture to shift to any significant amount and moving from like to customer service centric versus self-service centric, um, is a paradigm shift for a lot of organizations. Have, and I’m, I’m a communications nerd, so I know there’s a, that’s a huge part of selling value, understanding what it means.
So congratulations for it only taking about a year. That’s mind blowing.
Brad Englert: Well, I only had to replace, uh, three outta seven of my direct reports to make the change so…
Russel Lolacher: Okay. So the tipping point wasn’t too far off. That’s good. Well, that kind of speaks a lot to our topic today, which is all around influence. Because to make changes like that, you have to have some influence and understand the influences that are being put upon you in any particular role. So I guess before I get into digging deep into this with you, uh, Brad, I have to first define with you what influence even is.
Brad Englert: Well, for me, influence is, uh, working with others to help you and them achieve what their goals are.
Russel Lolacher: What do you mean by sphere? Is it just the people that are within your immediate network? Is it a goal to achieve of being like improving your sphere? Like why the geographical limitation to influence.
Brad Englert: Well, that’s a great question. I, um, when I retired from the university, I knew I wanted to write a book ’cause I want to share these stories with a wider audience. You know, I still mentor two or three people, but that doesn’t scale. So, um, my editor said, just inventory all your stories and we’ll get to a whiteboard and we’ll just figure it out and the stories fell into those relationships that were closest to me. My boss, my direct reports, executive leaders, and all my staff. So those in your organization. And then I had these stories of external sphere or relationships, customers, peers, and influencers, and strategic vendor partners. And it all just, and she said, don’t write a page till you have your full outline.
And I, I followed her advice and it just fell into place.
Russel Lolacher: Now in your, in your book, you do talk about internal versus external influence. Now that seems pretty straightforward, but I, I kind of wanna get that defined as well because are we talking internal, as in just the organization, just our team? Or is, is external outside our team? Is it executive? Like where are the boundaries to internal to external influence?
Brad Englert: Well, I, I think roughly it’s, uh, internal is in your organization and external is outside your organization. So it, it depends. So when I was a consultant, my customers were external to the organization. When I was at the university, my customers were in the organization. So it, it depends on, uh, the context.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. I mean, it, it, it does seem overly obvious, but some people will think that external could be, and that depends a lot on culture because your team could be your internal, because the external, even the other business area over there could have a completely different culture, subculture than your team.
So I was just kind of trying to make sure I understood internal, external, could be macro and micro even within that realm.
Brad Englert: Oh sure. That’s right. Yep.
Russel Lolacher: Do you look at these, if you’re establishing influence, if you are trying to take advantage of influence that you have as a leader, do you look at internal and external differently?
I mean, we’re all talking humans here. We’re all talking diversity here, but do you look at it differently when you are differentiating them and how.
Brad Englert: I think it’s a matter of, uh, cadence. How often do you meet with people? So with my boss, I would meet every week for 30 minutes. With my direct reports, I would meet every week for 30 minutes. With, um, and I would always go into those discussions with an agenda and, um, I’d send it to ’em beforehand and ask what they wanted to talk about.
With my customers, it was usually a cadence of monthly. I would get together once a month and and just talk about how things are going, how things could be improved, uh, big initiatives that were coming. We, we changed so many systems at the university that affected everybody. So the learning management system affected 54,000 students and 4,000 faculty, so that was a two year transition from the old clunky system to the new modern system. Uh, we changed all the phones to voiceover ip, 21,000 phones. We basically irritated everybody once a year no matter what. And the good news is over eight years, we’ve moved as many of these services to the cloud. So when I, uh, my successor in March, 2020 was able to increase the VPN increased Zoom and 70,000 people went online to do teaching, research, and work. And uh, but that took a lot of, lot of work.
Russel Lolacher: I’m kind of curious too about possibly the misunderstanding of influence and I kind of, I’m, I’m as guilty as the best, uh, as the most, because when I hear influence, I hear one way, like I’m influencing somebody else there might be influencing me. It doesn’t feel like relationship building based on what the word has meant to me previously.
So I’m kind of curious as to why you maybe chose that particular word. And maybe how else it gets confused in the workplace when we’re talking about relationships. ’cause I’m obviously part of the problem.
Brad Englert: Well, I, I stepped back after I finished the manuscript and I just said, okay, what is common? What is the common thread in all these relationships? And there are three principles that came to light. Number one, understand their goals and aspirations. What are they trying to achieve? Whether it’s your boss or your customer, what are they trying to achieve?
Number two, set and manage expectations, which I was really bad at early in my career. I got a lot better at it later in my career, which, uh, allowed me to have balance in life. And then third is genuinely care about their success. And when I got to the university, I met with this professor who had been there for 40 years.
Uh. Really crusty, uh, electrical engineer. I worked with him on a statewide network project 15 years prior and successful. And I said, okay, gimme some advice. He goes, get out of the office and tell people you give a damn. And that was the best advice because you’re not in your office, you’re not hiding behind a screen. You’re getting out there and asking people, what are they trying to achieve? You’re sharing what you’re trying to achieve and then you’re seeking some mutual, uh, ways to help each other, and that’s how you get influence.
Russel Lolacher: I love the direction. I mean, regardless of how it was delivered, it’s, it is clear. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of leaders will say, I want you to do a thing. But they’re so vague about it. They’re so, like, there’s not clarity. It’s just, go fix a thing. I’m like, but what does success look like to you? What is, how do you want it to be done as opposed to me trying to read your mind?
Um, and I think that’s the bigger piece that a lot of leaders miss is that to be a thing like a director, you have to direct.
Brad Englert: Well.
Russel Lolacher: That is the root form of the word.
Brad Englert: Well, there are two phrases that came to mind. Uh, one is people are not mind readers. I agree with you. And two, use your words. So if you’re working for someone and you need something. Tell them. You know, use your words. And so with my direct reports, I really encouraged them to not only meet with me once a week, but get out and meet with their customers.
And that’s part of how we changed the culture. Uh, a woman who worked for me said that she read the manuscript says, you, you left my story out. I said, what story? I said, when you directed me to go meet with this customer who hated us. Oh yeah, I remember that. And she goes, I thought you were insane. Why would I go meet with someone who hates us?
And it’s like, it was, you know, prior bad behavior with the, uh, heroics culture. And she went and met with this person once a month. And after about eight or nine months, as we got better, more predictable, more transparent, more consistent… that person became an advocate for us. And her boss, who also hated us, justifiably ’cause there was some bad behavior, also became an advocate.
And you know, I met with them and I said, you know, I’m really sorry for what happened in the past. That’s not how we’re gonna work in the future. So I want you to just let that go and, you know, work with us so we can help you and you can help us get better.
Russel Lolacher: What I don’t think a lot of people understand is that love and hate are passions and… it’s fair, right? Indifference is the one you probably would be more afraid of, of trying to build a relationship with. But if they hate, that means they care and they’re fr and I, and I say this for employees as well, is if they hate and they’re, they, they, they care enough that they hate that passionately, that if you do right by them, it’s an easy, easier flip to love to championing.
Like you, you talk about then it is an indifference where they’re like, they don’t care what you do. It doesn’t matter, that ship has sailed. So. I always find it funny that people avoid those opportunities. Well, they hate us. Why would we talk to them? Because they don’t want to, they don’t want to hate you.
You’re making them hate, you do something differently.
Brad Englert: That’s right. I agree.
Russel Lolacher: So as leaders, how can we tell the difference between authentic influence, authentic relationship building and just being performative or having positional power? Like how can we make it clear that this is about relationship building as opposed to uh, bullying or, or just, you know, performative?
Brad Englert: Well. The premise of my book is we need to transcend traditional networking, which is transactional and superficial. And in my 40 years I’ve been to a lot of networking events. Guess how many customers I found in those networking events? Zero. And in fact, after one networking event, someone called me and asked for a donation to their not-for-profit.
It’s like, I don’t even know you. Why are you calling me? But it’s being, um, mutually beneficial. It’s being honest and truthful. It’s, um, it’s caring, you know, it’s really simple and it’s not complicated. So with my direct reports, I said I am meeting with eight to 10 people across campus every four to six weeks, depending on how often I work with them.
I want you to do the same. And we built this network across the university where we talk to 60, 70 people every month or so, and that was like our nervous system. We got to find out, you know, what was going well, what was not going well. Um, the VP for public safety. I met with him every month because it wasn’t, if something would go wrong, it’s when it would go wrong.
And how do we deal with it when it goes wrong? We had a bomb scare. We had a murder, we had a shooting. Uh, we had 103,000 people in the stadium every other Saturday uh, in the fall. Our teams worked together to keep people safe. And if we didn’t talk to each other and get our teams to talk to each other, how would we work together? And, and it was, um, same thing with the Vice Provost for, uh, Curriculum. She wanted to change the way classes were taught where we just recorded the lectures and have discussion in the classroom. Well, the learning management system was built in the nineties. It was clunky.
Students hated it. Uh, faculty didn’t like it. She couldn’t do that with that. So her organization and mine worked with faculty and staff to evaluate all the learning management systems in the market. We picked a brand new mission critical system that followed standards, which the old one didn’t. And over two years, we transitioned to this new learning management system. That that was 10 years ago. And the vendor, my legacy vendor, didn’t care about us. They didn’t care that it was clunky. They didn’t care if it was, uh, hated. And our new vendor, this senior Vice President for Sales, who I still talk to today, um, called me every month and said, how’s it going?
What can we do to help? And often we would ask them to change things ’cause at our scale we needed things that other customers didn’t. And he knew that if he could make us happy, all the other huge research one universities would follow. And you know what, that’s exactly what happened.
Russel Lolacher: To influence, I think it’s really important to also know yourself and your situation because I mean, you can’t be an influential person if you don’t know what your influence is. What’s influencing you, uh, when it comes to relationships. So how as leaders, can we be a little bit more self-reflective even before we go down this path of influence? Like defining what is influencing us, define how we influence before we even act.
Like where would we start there?
Brad Englert: Well. You need to have a strategy. And the dirty little secret out there is a lot of organizations don’t have a strategy and it’s, it’s crazy. So the university has, you know, $3 billion budget. They never had a strategy for IT. So when I got into the role, my first job was how do we build an IT strategy?
And get consensus from the constituents, faculty, students, staff of what we should be focusing on. That informed my priorities. So a new learning management system was number one on the list. Um, changing the old copper wire phone system, well, the vendor was shutting down, so we had, there was no choice, but that informed the strategy.
But also, even more importantly, we heard from campus what do they want from us? And what they wanted was transparency, consistency, truthfulness. Um, those became our values. And so. In the first 90 days when I talked to my direct reports, talked to, uh, many people, um, talked to the constituents, it was, they told us what they wanted and those became the values, and that’s what guided us.
And we updated the strategy every year. So we kept it fresh.
Russel Lolacher: What I’m hearing, and I’m, I’m starting to pull it back a little bit more though too because I wanna talk about the individual, the leader in preparing themself for everything you’ve talked about. I hear that somebody needs to be good at communication. I hear somebody being open with active listening. I hear somebody that needs to be altruistic, like thinking about what did they need as much as what they need, as what you need.
Um, I’m just trying to figure out like. I wanna put the right person in the right position that they’re trying to influence, but they have to be the right person for the job. So I’m just kind of curious as, as an individual, what should we be focusing on? May, maybe it’s mindset when it comes to this role, because not everybody can do this.
Not everybody’s thinking outside of, oh, I have to check my boxes to make my boss happy. Like, that’s not leadership, that’s management, that’s checkbox leadership. Right? So. What do you feel a leader needs to have internally to be able to have that kind of influence?
Brad Englert: Well, you need to have em… empathy. You know, I think empathy is, uh, underrated. Um, you also need to be a humble practitioner. Um, my predecessor was the Imperial CIO and you had to go, go to the ivory tower and supplicate. And you know, for me it was like, well, I’m gonna get outta the ivory tower and go meet with people in their office.
Um, so I think it’s you know, the humility, um, obviously you have to have confidence, but you need to, um, understand that in order to be successful, you need all the best minds thinking and helping you. And you don’t do that if you just stay in your office and behind a screen.
Russel Lolacher: I completely agree with you. Um, it’s that people part of leadership that I think other than the task management part of it. So now I’m, now I’m curious about the ROI from an individual standpoint. Because how do you check in that it’s working? How do you know that as you trying to be authentic, um, rather than whether it’s ego, whether it’s fear, whether it’s marching orders, all these places that don’t really fit when it comes to relationship building, how do you know you’re getting it right and how do you know and how do you maintain it?
Brad Englert: Well, um, with customers, you ask them how are you’re doing and what you, what can you do to improve, uh, with vendors? Uh, vendors, Um, we spent tens of millions of dollars a year on IT services. You need to know who your vendors are and make sure they’re helping you. Um, I had a situation where we budgeted a certain amount for networking here in a new data center.
Well, then the vendor came out with a new, um version of the network year. Well, we couldn’t afford that. So I sat down with them and said, look, look, we’re spending tens of millions of dollars. Can you discount this for us so we can get the next line, which will last many years longer? And you know what they did that. They gave us a discount and you know, I became the best reference they ever had. So you need to. Uh, really find areas where, uh, you, you can be mutually beneficial.
Russel Lolacher: But you talk about authentic authenticity in your, I can’t even say that word, authenticity from your book where it’s, it’s more of playing the long game. What does that look like?
Brad Englert: Yeah. It’s… You know what the litmus test is that you cannot talk to someone for five or 10 years, but when you reconnect, it’s like you never disconnected. I had a woman call me who is a customer. We had three or four successful engagements. Uh, 15 years later, she calls me, she goes, uh, my son is applying for a job at the university.
Uh, he’s an attorney now. Uh, could you talk with him? I knew her son when he was five years old.
Russel Lolacher: Okay.
Brad Englert: I was like, he’s an attorney. And it’s like, of course I can help. And so I talked with them and I said, look universities all share information with each other. There’s an association of lawyers at the university level find their website and find out what all their issues are.
And when I had a contract with Google, I didn’t start from scratch. We, my attorney called UC Berkeley and said, can we have your contract? And we used that. So he, uh did his homework, and guess what? He got the job. You know, it, it is like it didn’t matter that we hadn’t talked in 15 years.
Russel Lolacher: I’m super curious from a team level, ’cause you talk about mapping out your influence. You, you mentioned it before about just trying to understand where your influence is and who’s influencing you. How does that pertain to your particular team? Because your team might be diverse, it might be different, different genders, different generations, all these things.
Do you take that into account when you’re mapping your influence or is it just sort of like, oh, I oversee this person, I can influence them? Is it that binary?
Brad Englert: Uh, no. And I’m gonna go back, gonna go back to your communication, uh, discussion. So in order to change culture, you need to communicate. And I made the mistake early in my career of expecting my direct reports to communicate to their people what we wanted. Guess what? Doesn’t work? Some of them don’t know how, some of them want to keep the information for power.
Um, so it’s like that doesn’t work. So start with the values of the organization. It’s on the website, it’s mandatory orientation, so 330 people. We had people coming in every month mandatory orientation to meet the management team, to understand what our priorities are, understand our values, and you know, people try to sneak off and not go.
Well, I had a list, right? It’s like, I know you thought you were too busy to do this, but I need you to go to orientation. And over eight years everyone went through orientation. Then we had quarterly meetings, both hybrid and in person where we talk about the values. We’d bring in customers to talk about, uh, their issues and how things that went well.
Uh, we’d. Talk about things that didn’t go well and, uh, learn the, uh, art of apology. Um, and then I wrote a blog once a week for eight years. Very short. Yeah. Couple hundred words and it went out to 330 people on my staff and about 300 people outside of my organization that were interested in IT at UT. And that was a way for me to um, really open the doors both ways. So, uh, people would say, Hey, I saw your, your blog. Um, it was really good that you acknowledged, uh, these people working for you for 40 years, but it takes six months to get their pin. Would you look into that? It’s like, well, I didn’t know that. You know, we’re a big bureaucracy. Of course it takes six months, you know, so, you know, one call to HR say, oh, okay, yeah, we’ll get their pins. You know, it is just, um, you can’t leave it up to the grapevine.
Russel Lolacher: True. But at the same time, we have to take responsibility for ourselves as leaders because, and and I, I’ve been in that situation where you talked at earlier where it was about we think people are gonna relay our messages and then they don’t.
Brad Englert: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Sometimes it’s our fault and not theirs. That we communicated in a way that was not accessible.
They didn’t understand what we said because our communication sucks. So it’s really important for us to also continually evaluate how we’re communicating. I love that you did a blog post because for two reasons. One, and I’m gonna be super stereotypical here. The IT group ain’t generally good at communication. I’m just, I’m throwing it out there. I know it’s mind blowing for a lot of people,
Brad Englert: They love speaking in tongues. You know, they…
Russel Lolacher: Which they need to do. They’re brilliant for what they do. But when it comes to communic accessible communications that most people can understand, not generally their, their forte. But yourself in a leader position tr you know, having influence over an organization, having that regular cadence of communication, not onerous, like you said, it was nice and short.
But it also built that relatability. It built that comfort level because people feel like they get to know you. It’s like watching a TV program where the shows every week you get to know the characters, like you know them as actual people, even if you have no idea. But that opens up and that in invites feedback exactly like you would explain, going but can you fix this problem for me that you’d never heard before? But they feel like they know Brad because Brad communicates with them every week. Brad’s a person. Brad’s human. Brad talks to me. So I love that aspect of influence where it can be intimate even if you’re sending a blog out to 300 people, it can still feel intimate for individuals.
Brad Englert: Yeah. You know, when I met with my direct reports, I would always meet in their office. Well, why would I do that? One, it gets me out of the office. I get to walk across campus, bump into people, get the energy of from the students and and such. But their staff saw me show up every week, and I would basically show the flag.
And I would talk to people as I walked through the workplace and I knew who, what people were working on, and I would ask them about it. And, um, my, my, my customers, uh, the VP for public safety, I would meet in his office. And I think part of that is, uh, you know, just, you wanna know them as people and you know, they have stuff in their office.
The, uh, VP for public Safety went to the Ohio State University. Well, that university was my client for four years. I love that university. And we bonded on that. Uh, we bonded on that. So I think, um, you know, just walking the walk, you know, uh, you know, uh. Being a role model is really important. So I, uh, our, one of our values was family first.
Well, why did we do that? So I live in Austin, Texas. We have all the multinational IT companies here. I cannot compete on salary, but you know what? I can compete on? An eight hour day.
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Brad Englert: And hybrid work. And I had this network engineer who. Quit and he was gonna work for a startup and I said, look, I don’t say this for everybody, but if you don’t like it, you can come back.
Well, he left two weeks later, he calls and he goes, okay, the startup is a zoo. They feed me and they do my dry cleaning ’cause I never get to go home. I took the job ’cause they offered equity and it was good for my family. But I don’t see my family anymore. Can I come back? It’s like, absolutely. You know, and he’s still there 15 years later, so, um…
Russel Lolacher: And how many, how many organizations talk about relationship building. Talk about we’re all in this together. And then the minute somebody wants to go somewhere else, they’re the enemy. Like, you abandoned us. We, oh, now we gotta replace you. You’ve made more work for me. What kind of relationship was that to begin with? If you know, to your point, treating them more like the opportunity for them to come back because you’ve invested time, you know them as a person, you like working with them, circumstances happen. So I love that it’s impor… how important you valued. It’s a relationship and you need to walk the walk and talk the, talk to your point, rather than just saying it.
’cause it’s a word on a wall in our values exercise as opposed to somebody going somewhere else and you’re like, well, they’re dead to us. I can’t believe they left. Now I have to train somebody else. Yeah. That’s your job.
Brad Englert: Well, and that keeps it from being transactional and superficial to be authentic. Um, you know, I, I, I would, I would tell people not to check email 24/7. In IT, you could work 24/7. It, it’s always there and it’s, and you love what you do, so you kind of can do that, but I would not check email 24/7. I would not expect my staff to do that, and I would expect their staff to do that.
I would tell them, and this was one of my blog posts, which was we have 330 people. If you need to go to the doctor, go to the doctor. If you need to go take a vacation. Take a vacation. If you need training, go to training. We value training. You know, we have people to back you up. And then I would model that behavior.
I would go on vacation, I would go to training. I would not check email 24/7. So you have to, you know, show people, uh, what you want to see.
Russel Lolacher: But I think, but I think what you’re illustrating there is important to, to really mention because influence isn’t just about, and we may have started there in the conversation and that’s, that’s on me, is that it’s not about what you can get out of somebody and what they can get out of you. There’s also back to the relationship piece, is you have to care. You have to care about the journey to, yes. It’s not, it’s not transactional. And we might have maybe started that a bit with the conversation. I don’t think we overly defined too much, but there is that we need, it’s the journey as much as the destination, right? It is that relationship build care.
Because then people want to help you out and you want to help them out because they’re not a cog in a wheel. They’re not a number. They’re not an ROI. They are a person. Um, and I like that you highlighted that, that it’s about caring. It’s not just about what you can get outta somebody and then move on.
Brad Englert: Exactly. You know, 80% to 90% of Accenture’s customers are repeat customers. Well, why is that? Because you’ve been successful together. There’s a trusting relationship. Um, it’s a lot cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a new customer. Um, so there is actually ROI in…
Russel Lolacher: oh, there always is. It’s just a matter of how much you prioritize it over, you know, human wellbeing.
Brad Englert: That’s right. Yep.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m kind of curious from a culture standpoint. So you want to focus on influence. You want to be more employee-centric, customer-centric, human-centric, but you work in an organization that’s transactional, that’s hero focused, as you mentioned before, that is performative. ’cause there’s a lot of organizations out there because as we both know, there’s not one culture.
There is millions of subcultures in organizations. So how do you operate within a culture that doesn’t see what you do as valuable because they’ve operated in another way for so long? I know you shifted the, the organization in a record one year, but you still had to operate for a while within a organization that maybe didn’t see it the same way you did. How do you handle that?
Brad Englert: Oh, that’s a, that’s a great question. Um. You know, I, I met with the president of a large university one time, and he goes, I, I asked him, I said, how do you make change in higher ed? Because higher ed could move in slow and mysterious ways. And he goes, well, Brad, it’s just like going through, walking through a room full of rattlesnakes.
You can do it, but you have to do it really slowly. So.
Russel Lolacher: And why are they rattlesnakes? Why is it that dangerous? That’s not a great metaphor.
Brad Englert: And so, you know, I had some peers, which we haven’t really talked about, but I had some peers who did not appreciate what we do and, um, one peer actually thought he knew how to run my organization and early on. I would get these emails from our boss that were clearly written by my peer because he would write in clouds of words and my boss would always send an email with no subject line and short ’cause he’s on his phone.
And I would see, I’d get this big email and I’d check the calendar ’cause I do run this it and I show that two minutes after I. My peer and my boss had their one-on-one. I’d get this email from my boss. It’s like, okay guys. And so I met with the boss and I said, okay. I actually took a piece of paper out on the table and I said, I drew three heads and put headphones on those and curled wires between them.
I said, okay, you’re the head coach boss. When you give me orders from my peer through your headset, then you don’t need me anymore. I need you to hold him accountable for his organization, hold me accountable for my organization. And if you can’t do that, then you don’t need me. So it was also you have to manage up and down and across.
And you know, he was so used to working with my peer. He had been there for 13 years, you know, blah, blah, blah. I’m the new guy. So, you know, boss just kind of fell into this pattern of, I’ll just listen to my peer. Well, he didn’t know what he was talking about, so it’s like I’m a trained professional, so let him do his thing. I’ll do my thing.
Russel Lolacher: But it also highlights how influence can be hurtful and re established relationships that are already there before you even show up can really be a roadblock to success, to con your own connection because they’ll listen to, they know them, they don’t know you, so they must be right over you. So that, that kind of makes me curious about ethics, because you talk about navigating ethics within an organization with influence.
How do you navigate ethics within an organization in that way?
Brad Englert: Well, you just have to, um, be unethical is your North Star, and if you have a boss who asks you to do something unethical, you shouldn’t do it. And you know, I, it’s, it’s, it’s better to leave that situation then be forced into something that you wouldn’t want to do.
Russel Lolacher: Do you, do you feel that ethics is more… is it that far gone? Like is it, so I’m just trying to wonder where the murkiness of ethics, like is it not following your, your values, like being hypocritical about your values? ’cause some people would think that’s unethical or is it criminal behavior? Like, I don’t know how far, what’s the, the spectrum when we’re talking about ethics?
When it comes to influence, like you talk about leaving the organization, but some people might just be a bad day and you’re labeling it unethical as opposed to a systemic problem.
Brad Englert: Well, um, in graduate school I had a professor who was a congresswoman, Barbara Jordan. She helped impeach, uh, Nixon and she taught ethics and. We often said, you know, what would Barbara Jordan do? And, and that’s kind of the mantra I had through my career is what would Barbara Jordan do? And, you know, you just, um, have to tie yourself to the mast and, and not get pulled into, uh, things you shouldn’t be doing.
Russel Lolacher: Completely agree. I think, I think it just reinforces the definition of, or understanding definition of ethics. I think organizations maybe need to define what they’re talking about. ’cause for me, to my point, I’m like, maybe it’s not following your values. Then obviously ethics isn’t being properly defined for me. Within an organization, if I’m jumping to conclusions, is what unethical and ethical is within an organization. So I think it might be important if we’re building relationships and we’re trying to navigate those relationships, we need to know what guardrails we have up and what we don’t have up within an organization.
And that comes from culture. That comes from leadership modeling the behaviors they want and need and so forth.
Absolutely. I like to wrap up too my conversations with asking the question around if we were starting tomorrow.
I kind of, I think I know the answer based on our conversation, but if we needed to start tomorrow to understand, we have no idea what our influence is, we don’t know what our influence is on us within the organization or outside of it, where do we start? Is it mapping? Is it mapping our influence? Because I think that sounds like the most obvious way to, to go down the path of self situational awareness before we even understand where we can push the buttons or, or, or build relationships.
Brad Englert: Yeah, there’s actually a technique out in the world called power mapping where you take an organization chart and you circle those important people and then those who are influencers who may not be high on the org chart, but they’re important. And so you need to be strategic and intentional about who you’re building relationships with.
You don’t have to do it with everybody and you know, not all vendors, but take the top five. Not all customers. Take your best customers. Um, your boss is obvious. Direct report’s obvious, but, um, I would ask my staff, just be intentional about who you’re working with and, and focus there. I had a chief of staff for a CFO at one large organization that was very influential. She’d been there 30 years. Everyone trusted her. We together led a transformational project. I went to another similar size organization, talked to the CFO’s chief of staff, and she goes, Brad, I don’t think you should talk with me. I’ve only been here a year and I’m doing these dinky little projects. Don’t waste your time talking to me. And it was like, well, thank you. I won’t, so, you know, you need to kind of feel out, you know, who’s influential and who’s not.
Russel Lolacher: I feel bad for that person’s, their self-worth might need a little bit of a pump up too.
Brad Englert: Well, she was honest.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. Fair enough. Thank you very much. That is Brad Englert. He is an author, advisor, and technologist, and if you haven’t picked up his book yet, that’s something you can do. It’s an Amazon bestseller, uh, Spheres of Influence, How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships. Thank you so much for being here, Brad.
Brad Englert: Oh, thank you.