Keywords

Resilience - Individualism - Influence - Leadership - Accountability

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Brian Smith, the founder and senior managing partner of IA Business Advisors, a management consulting firm that has worked with more than 19,000 CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, and employees worldwide. In this podcast Brian discusses the importance of understanding people in leadership, the role of accountability in promoting positive learning, the multidimensional influence individuals can have and how their non-participation can affect others.

Main topics

• Approaching leadership development in small and medium-sized organisations
• How individualism can mean different things depending on the area of influence
• Understanding and harnessing our influence in a positive way
• Why accountability is important for setting expectations and promoting positive learning.

Timestamps

1: Introductions and Background - 00:00-01:39

2: Leadership and Accountability - 02:08-11.40

3: Diagnosing Business Problems - 11:41-14:57

4: Individualism and Influence - 15:00-20:12

5: Conclusions - 20:50-22:51

Action items

Find out more at IABusinessAdvisors.com/the-i-in-team-series/or check out their social media accounts under “I” in Team series handle.

Their latest book is, Positive Influence – Be the “I” in Team which shares how to become our best selves with everyone we influence.

Hey, and welcome back to Resilience, Unravelled. And it's been my pleasure over the course of many years to meet people with some of the most complicated names, the most difficult to pronounce names, the most challenging taxonomies and dichotomies and such like, if that's a word. And today I'm meeting Brian Smith. And you have no idea what a relief it is to have such a good name to be able to introduce you to. So hi, Brian, how are you?

I'm well, thank you.

I'm detecting an accent from over the pond. So where in the world are you?

I am just outside of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States.

Fantastic. And how's life over there? At the moment? We're experiencing hot heat, hot summers. It's absolutely marvellous. How's Chicago?

Actually, it's been a little cool, but it's nice. And funny enough. I was in London a few weeks ago, and it was warm then too. And it seemed like most of the people over there enjoyed having a lot of sunshine.

Yeah, well, good job. Those Americans tell us that climate change doesn't exist, so we know this is just normal. That we're roasting at the moment is quite odd. Well, it's a delight to meet with you. So why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is that you do?

Well, I am the managing partner of IA Business Advisors, which is an international fractional C suite or management consulting company. I founded it in 1996. I'm also an author of the

“I”in team’ series. We have two books, and I'm a speaker. I speak around the world about leadership development and culture development within small and medium sized organisations.

Okay, very good. Do you see that there's a difference. In leadership between different sizes of organisations or even different sectors of organisations? Do you see differences between those things?

Oh, most definitely. I think leadership is an evolution, and it's an evolution within the leader’s area of influence and how they have prepared themselves to the point of becoming a leader, and then how they take that responsibility and evolve within the leadership role as their organisations grow or shrink or change through time. So, yeah, it's very different in all the different levels and within the different industries.

Yes, and you see, I agree with that. I think we spend far too much time listening to leadership lessons from those who've been at the top of organisations, who are usually very large organisations, like Jack Welsh, for example. To think of no one just happened to look at his book this morning and just thinking, actually, for the vast majority of people, it's good advice, but it doesn't really apply to a lot of people.

It applies to some people, but not the vast majority. I just wonder there seems to be a dearth of pragmatic, mid-sized organisational leadership books. So, yours is interesting. How do you see the role of a mid-sized organizational leader what do you think of the priorities?

Well, I think the number one priority is their people and that transcends not just their people that are in their organisation, but their people that support them. So, on the vendor side and the customer side. But at the end of the day, being a leader is about the people and understanding what your responsibility is to each group of those people and within those groups there are even more refined groups. I mean, there's different departments or different areas of influence and that can go.

Also with our vendors, customers or our teams and I think when leaders understand the people, the rest starts to fall into place and you can develop the processes and the technologies to support them but without understanding the people, you can't have the others.

So it is interesting, isn't it? Because I expected you to say process so I was quite surprised when you said people because often it's management consultants who talk about process and finance so what's led to this approach.

That it's people first? Well, I started my career as an accountant, and it was back in the. days when computerised accounting systems were being put on desktops. And obviously because I jumped into that world, I chose to focus on process and technology. And technology is going to change the world and is going to solve all these human problems. But what I learned was that its people, process and technology and that every time we put a piece of technology on a desktop, or we introduce a new process or business process or new policy, that what rooted the success, was the people. So, it moved me towards adding to my education. I went back and got my doctorate in organisational psychology to help understand and to help build improvement management systems that used technology, process and policy as tools, not as the foundation.

Yes. Interesting. Roaming around your website, it's quite interesting to see how many references that there are to the word accountable, which I think is one of my pet things. And I just wondered what your view was. Obviously, you think accountability is important, so can you unpack the subject of this for us?

Yeah, well, I think that without accountability, it's difficult to be a leader or to set expectations. If you set expectations without offering accountability positive and learning accountability, that it falls flat and to do that, you have to be pretty smart about what you do. And if you're smart and to us, smart is literal, the smart goal system is specific, measurable attainable, realistic and timely. And if you lead in a smart way, accountability falls out because people know what the expectations are and when they know what they are. Accountability is easy and it doesn't have to be a negative, it can always be a positive. You can show them what was missed, you can reintroduce them to whatever was missed to reach their goal or to finalize a tactic and then you can help them to continue moving forward. And that's really what accountability should be, is helping people to move forward, not hold them back or punish them.

Yeah, and I think it's learning from mistakes as well, isn't it? It's that thing about seeing accountability as a learning system I think people see accountability as a punitive concept but it's like the word consequences, isn't it? When you talk about there will be consequences to your actions people assume the negative but very rarely say oh that's exciting and it's the same with accountability isn't it? And I think you're right. I think the fundamental building block of leadership is accountability because without that what's the leader for? If you don't actually admit their mistakes and roll forward, I mean board meetings just end up being punishment sessions, don't they? And I think it's one of the challenges in most small organisations that board meeting is either non-existent or it's a bunch of professional advisors not having a useful meeting for me the way you scale organisations bring in really good board meeting structures I wonder what you think about that?

Yeah, well, any good communication structure is going to move an organisation forward. And when that communication structure is led with smart discussions and yes, they have agendas, and we don't focus on what as you just pointed out, the negative aspects of consequence or the negative aspects of accountability when there is a culture of positivity and accountability is always known to be moving us in the direction that we intended to go. It's not intended to slow us down or be a speed bump. It's intended to be a learning opportunity. Similarly, consequences and consequences should be both positive and negative and we shouldn't only celebrate accountability in a negative way or consequences in a negative way. We find ourselves as humans doing that all the time. We should celebrate positive consequences and positive accountability. What are the positives of it? And when you do that in boardrooms team meetings, one to one communication you change the overall culture of an organisation and you get everybody swimming in the right direction

Russell 09.35

it's a fascinating concept, isn't it? Because a lot of people there's a sort of fit theory. One of the big theories in leadership I think is servant leadership, this idea that I got it wrong, we got it right. And I find that difficult to take actually, because I think we got it wrong, and we got it right. Or I got it wrong, and I got it right. And I think I actually think there's a sort of a toxic positivity that you can get in. Some organisations are so busy on the happy clappy. it's all going to be great. You lose that sense of how you stretch people and that thing about that expectation that some people can do more or can do better or can do differently. But if we don't have accountability, you never sort of discover that bit because we're all busy celebrating or criticizing and actually, I think consequences is different to accountability in a funny sort of way. It's almost like the accountability is the input to get the consequences which are a different output. I don't know what you think.

Yeah, I think there is a difference between being held accountable and suffering or celebrating the consequences. Being held accountable is understanding the consequences of your actions both positive and negative and the consequences are the result. Accountability is an understanding and a learning opportunity and they're very different but they're synergistic with each other almost all the time.

And I think this is really important because you talk on your website again about diagnosing what ails your business which I think is a great phrase but actually if everyone's hiding everyone's blaming everybody else you can't find that bit. And actually, what you want to do is work with an organisation sometimes that knows it's got a problem, doesn't know how to fix it. That's a more fulfilling thing than an organisation that doesn't know they've got a problem thinks they're perfect. I mean many times I'm called into organisations to work with a top team and fix the organisation and of course we both know it's always the top team. It's the problem. It's like when you have a misbehaving pet it's nearly always the owner. So, I'm interested in your thought then about how you diagnose what might tailor business. I'm guessing you've got some sort of process.

We do. We have a process that we've had for 20 years plus called Biz Vision. It is a structured process. We follow a policy and it's a narrative and a yes and no question session that walks the organisation leaders and managers and employees through sharing with us.

Whatever aspect of the business we're diving into. It's tailored to asking questions and making them be thoughtful and introspective about what's going on in their areas of influence and sharing that with us and we map that out and it kind of draws a picture for us.

and allows us to find ourselves in the area of root cause and start to understand contextually the root causes of the issues that they feel out here somewhere on the fringes of their company.

But it takes them through into a root cause and it almost always eventually has one of the participants or many of our participants looking in the mirror and having an AHA moment.

We often are told by our clients just the process of answering your Q and A helped me contextualise and understand where I might be wrong and where the foundation of our problems are. Now how do we move forward?

Yes and that's very interesting listening to talk about that and knowing you've got qualifications in organisational psychology because it's extraordinarily Freudian approach, it's psychoanalytical process really, isn't it? It's quite interesting the way you're doing that. And of course, he used to observe the same thing. That was the questions that were key to the soul, weren't they? And it just makes sense, I think. Organisations learn something, don't they, from the questions that are asked? Not just it's not the answers to the questions. It's the questions themselves are the key, aren't they?

Almost 100% of the time. That's the feedback we get. That your questions made me think deeper. I never thought to pose a question to myself like you have asked us, and I've never thought to ask anybody in my organisation that question. And we align that with assessments of those same people. We use Disc and Colby in our biz vision process to help us understand even how people might approach those Q and A sessions and why they may choose or not choose to answer the way they do.

It helps us to understand from a behavioral aspect, how they interact within their areas of influence, and we add that information to the answers we get and to the interactions we get to our overall analysis in helping them become a more improved organisation.

Yeah. How fascinating. I like that. Okay, so you mentioned the books earlier. You better tell us a little bit about those.

Yeah. So, back in the mid-teens of 2000, my daughter was finishing up college. She co-writes our book series with me, she’s an English major, and she asked permission to read my journals. I j have journaled every day for over 30 years and have over a thousand journals. So, she asked permission to dive into my journals. And she came to me and says, wow just coupled with your belief in individualism and influence, we could write some books together. And we did.

Our books are about, well, the individual us. But our definition of individual is much different. Russell, you and I together are right now, bringing information to a group of individuals who, together are an individual group of people that have an interest in the topics we're talking about. Companies are individual made up of many individuals. They are groups of AR team, the accounting team, the marketing team. When they work together, they are individual. And so, we talk about redefining individualism to mean one to many, depending on what your area of influence is, what you want to do with that influence, individualism can mean many different things and then influence our understanding of influence is this we as humans begin to influence before we're even born.

When our parents learned that were going to be born, were already influencing the lives of people, and we hadn't even taken our first breath. And as humans, we influence our entire life. And that influence is amazingly important. And I think that humans take our influence for granted. I don't think we understand the influence and the power we have, no matter

who we are, what station in life you have what your job is. You influence people every day and that's a huge responsibility. And our books are about understanding yourself, understanding your influence, bringing it together so that you can be the most positive influence that you or your organization can be in whatever area of influence you find yourself.

What would you say are the things that take away from influence? What are the things that detract or destroy or minimise their influence, would you say?

Well, I'm not sure there's anything that minimises it. Non-participation, I mean, not engaging, but even not engaging has influence. When people stop engaging with you, it has an influence on both of you. You lose out from the benefit of whatever topics you ceased to engage about and the people that you were engaging with lose out on your contributions to whatever was happening prior to your disengagement.

If you react negatively towards something and you talk over the top of people in an argument, you lose the opportunity of understanding contextually why the other person. might be upset or have the emotions they have and whatever that engagement is about.

So influence is multidimensional and I'm not sure that there's such thing as a takeaway or an add to as in understanding what level of influence you play at a particular moment and how to balance that and how to prioritise it and how to benefit from it in a positive way. So that whatever that area of influence is, it moves you and everybody in the direction that is beneficial to everybody.

And I know that's a lot to unpack, but it's how we've written our books. The first book is about understanding how you are, who you are and what your influence is and getting some grasp as to where you are currently and what that means and then how to move that forward is the second book. How do you be the influence in your life? How do you make that a positive experience for you and for others?

I know that was a long answer. Russell, but that actually was a very difficult question.

Good. The reason I asked it is because I think there's a real dearth of insight and influence because I think we've got the Chalvini stuff which we've always banged on about, which is more of a marketing approach to supply to people. But I think there's a gap in the market, isn't there, about really and I like your approach basically it's about centering on yourself, being who you are. And your point, I think is really insightful about you're always influencing, even if you're not. It's a bit like having an organization culture. You either have one, you design, you've got the one, yet you've caught by accident. So, influence is a bit like that, isn't that? I like that theory.

So if you want to get our hands on the books, where would you do that?

Over in the UK. Amazon is the best place. I'm happy to say that both our books have been international bestsellers because of the UK and they're both available through Barnes and Noble. I don't know if you have access to Barnes and Noble.

Amazon is fine. Yeah, I think you just have to say the word Amazon these days and it's just like code word for all right. You know, as long as you're an Amazon, that's all that matters. And if we need to find out more about you, Brian, do you have a website? Do you have social media that people should follow?

Yeah, our website is IA businessadvisors.com and we have a publications page that's very insightful about our work. Not just our books, but also the 300 to 400 blogs and articles we've written for periodicals and magazines around the world. And then on social, the best place to follow us is at the “I” in Team series and we're on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And the” I” in Team series is really the best place to get our work, especially about influence and what our beliefs are about individualism and influence and how it applies to each of us.

Brilliant. Well, look, it's been an absolute blast talking today. I really enjoyed it and I'm off to have a look at Amazon and purchase a copy.

So that's really good. So, Brian, thanks very much for spending time with us today. It's Brian Smith. The website was iabusinessadvisors.com and unusually, the advisors are spelled with an S. I'm just going to say how marvellous that is to see the correct spelling. Just say and books are available on Amazon. So, thank you for spending time with us today, Brian. It's been a blast. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Russell.

You take care.

You too.