Unlock the secret to transformative leadership and team synergy with Mark Miller, Chick-fil-A's seasoned veteran of High-Performance Leadership, in our latest podcast installment. Prepare to be inspired as we journey together through Mark's four decades of experience, revealing the keys to breaking free from the metaphorical 'quicksand' that ensnares many leaders, preventing them from fostering outstanding teams. In our engaging conversation, Mark distills his life's work into personal stories and actionable advice, all aimed at helping you, the listener, to not only enhance your leadership skills but also to nurture a culture of excellence within your own team.
Embark on a quest for personal growth and strategic life choices with the wisdom gained from Mark's extensive career. This episode is not just about climbing the career ladder; it's about the significance of proactive learning, owning your development journey, and the surprisingly influential role of adding value to propel your career. Whether you're facing the tumultuous challenges of today's workplace or seeking the path to effective leadership and personal development, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for both emerging and established leaders ready to shape the future of high-performance cultures. Join us as we dissect these leadership challenges and offer you the tools to navigate through the complexities of modern-day team dynamics.
Make sure to check out Mark's upcoming free livestream on January 16th. The live stream is called "A Year of Uncommon Greatness" and the content ties directly with his new book, Uncommon Greatness.
We need your help to get the Lead Culture podcasts in front of more leaders! There are three simple things you can do that truly help us:
Unlock the secret to transformative leadership and team synergy with Mark Miller, Chick-fil-A's seasoned veteran of High-Performance Leadership, in our latest podcast installment. Prepare to be inspired as we journey together through Mark's four decades of experience, revealing the keys to breaking free from the metaphorical 'quicksand' that ensnares many leaders, preventing them from fostering outstanding teams. In our engaging conversation, Mark distills his life's work into personal stories and actionable advice, all aimed at helping you, the listener, to not only enhance your leadership skills but also to nurture a culture of excellence within your own team.
Embark on a quest for personal growth and strategic life choices with the wisdom gained from Mark's extensive career. This episode is not just about climbing the career ladder; it's about the significance of proactive learning, owning your development journey, and the surprisingly influential role of adding value to propel your career. Whether you're facing the tumultuous challenges of today's workplace or seeking the path to effective leadership and personal development, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for both emerging and established leaders ready to shape the future of high-performance cultures. Join us as we dissect these leadership challenges and offer you the tools to navigate through the complexities of modern-day team dynamics.
Make sure to check out Mark's upcoming free livestream on January 16th. The live stream is called "A Year of Uncommon Greatness" and the content ties directly with his new book, Uncommon Greatness.
We need your help to get the Lead Culture podcasts in front of more leaders! There are three simple things you can do that truly help us:
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Speaker 2:Art of Leadership Network. Hey leaders, welcome to the Lead at Culture podcast, part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenni Catron. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore powerful insights and practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity and confidence and build a thriving team. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self-leadership so you'll learn to lead yourself well, so you can lead others better. Each week, we'll take a deep dive on a leadership or culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed to leading well. So let's keep learning on this leadership journey together. Friends, today I am joined by Mark Miller.
Speaker 2:Mark's passion is serving leaders, whether speaking to global audiences or individual leaders. His message is consistent and pragmatic- lead every day. His career at Chick-fil-A began over 40 years ago as an hourly team member in one of the local restaurants. Shortly after that, he became Chick-fil-A's 16th corporate employee and since that day he has worked all across the business, but recently retired as the VP of high-performance leadership, where he was a principal architect in building Chick-fil-a's renowned leadership culture. Mark's the author of over a dozen books, several of which we'll touch on today. Mark is best known for his ability to unlock the full potential of executives and teams to create high performance leaders and organizations.
Speaker 2:In our conversation, Mark talks about the strategic choice to be a learner and grow your capacity, why so many leaders feel like they are in quicksand and how to get out of it, and how, if you build a great team, you can do amazing things. Guys, there are so many powerful insights in this episode. I was so excited to talk to Mark Miller. You'll hear me share with him how I was reading one of his books when I was writing the Four Dimensions of Extraordinary Leadership, and I have been a fan from afar. We have a number of mutual friends and so got such a privilege to sit down with Mark and just glean so much inside of 30 minutes. So I know you're going to love this conversation with Mark Miller. Mark, I am so excited to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 1:Well, it's my pleasure.
Speaker 2:I have been a longtime fan and have read a number of your books. In fact, I didn't tell you this before we started recording, but I was reading, I think, the heart of a leader. Did I get the title right?
Speaker 1:The Heart of Leadership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, The Heart of Leadership. I was reading that when I was on a writing retreat, writing one of my books.
Speaker 2:And I still can very vividly remember. I was sitting in a restaurant, I was kind of decompressing from the day, but I was working on the relational side of leadership and that was the book I was reading just to give me some inspiration and and so just lots of respect for the work you do. So I would love for you to just kind of kick it off for our listeners with what, why and when did leadership become important to you?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it really became important. I was a small child and I would ask my mother to help me age this. She's gone to glory so I can't ask her, but I'm guessing I was in third grade-ish, so, however, old that would have been.
Speaker 1:And the coach told me that I was going to be the catcher on the baseball team. He actually told me at practice one day because the catcher didn't show up. I knew nothing about catching and he said put this equipment on. And he said you need to stay low. This was my training on being a catcher Stay low and don't reach. And that was it. And he'll come in.
Speaker 1:And so I left practice a little uncomfortable. I said well, if I'm going to be a catcher, I need to know more about catching. And so, crazy enough, this was totally out of character and personality for me. I'm not a bookish kind of guy, but I thought to myself I wonder if they've got a book in the library on how to be a catcher. Now, I know that's crazy, this little kid, that's awesome. I went to the library. Johnny Bench, 14-time All-Star Hall of Famer, had written a book on how to be a catcher, uh-uh. And when you opened it up, it said you are the leader of the team On the first page. That's awesome. And he said let me explain why you're the leader. Blah, blah, blah. And now let me teach you how to be that leader. So my first leadership book that I ever read was as a kid trying to learn to play the position of a catcher and actually trying to live into the responsibility that Johnny Bench gave me as the leader, and it was the craziest thing Little kids started following me.
Speaker 2:And so I said huh, that's crazy.
Speaker 1:That's kind of cool, but that's I kind of was thrust into it as a child.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is amazing. Okay, so why is the catcher the leader of the team? I'm so curious.
Speaker 1:Well, at least remember. I'm not even sure that's right, but this is Johnny.
Speaker 2:Bench, the Hall of Famer, a catcher's point of view.
Speaker 1:But his position on it.
Speaker 2:I need to go back and find that book, yeah it's fascinating and maybe it's probably going to be in an old bookstore or somewhere.
Speaker 1:He said you're the only one that can see the entire field at one time, you're the only one involved in every play Play and you're the on-field general, Even when the ball's coming in from the outfield, you've got to tell the cutoff man to cut it or not, or where to throw it. You've got to take the signs from the coach to give the signs to the pitcher. You tell the pitcher which pitch is to throw. Now the pitcher can shake you off, but the catcher's the one that is calling the game. And he just went on and on and on and on and on, it's like, and so you've got to leverage this. It's this, this positional advantage, right and turned it into a leadership advantage. Was, was, I think, my summary all these decades later, of what I love, that.
Speaker 2:I love that. Well, in the fact, did the leadership board stick out to you in that? I mean, it seems like that that first sentence obviously caught your attention. So did you embody that leadership like idea that early?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't. I didn't understand it, obviously to the extent I do now. I just said, ok, if, if this role is a leadership role, this book is going to tell me how to do that and what to do it. I learned now. Remember, when you're a little kid, you've got somebody's dad is coaching right, these are real coaches, right. They were amazed that I actually knew more about the game in some respects than they did, because I'm getting it from Johnny Bench and they just showed up because they volunteered to keep the score.
Speaker 2:I kind of wrote into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just remember it was kind of had influence up as well. Yeah, because I actually understood the role, of the responsibilities and the position better than many of the coaches. It was kind of it was weird as a little kid.
Speaker 2:I remember that. Yeah, I love that. I love how distinct that memory is. I think every leader that I talk to has a moment like that, right when there's something that makes you kind of wake up to the reality that, oh, I've got. What do I even believe about leadership? What does this mean? And now, how do I live into that?
Speaker 1:And it can be learned. Yes, yes, he says. I mean, I was, I was actually learning, and yeah, so it was. There were a lot of lessons. That's probably another talk for another day.
Speaker 2:It's so good, it's so good. Okay, I've heard you say that leaders are the lever to literally change the world, so tell us more about that, about some of your belief around that.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the short answer is I would just ask the listeners to think about anything profound, significant good or that yielded in progress or performance that didn't have its root in leadership. Oh, no home, no school, no church, no business, no army. No individual has made progress without leadership and if you're thinking about it individually, you're not going to improve without self-leadership. Right, right, it's like it just did. Things don't drift to better, right, organizations don't drift to greatness, teams don't drift to great. You drift, but you don't do greatness right.
Speaker 1:You drift to mediocrity or worse. And it's leadership that that arrests the drift and can point people and teams and organizations and churches and schools and chicken businesses. It's leadership that that enables all of the progress that the people ultimately may bring. The leaders don't make the progress, they enable the progress.
Speaker 2:That's right, yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's just I can't. I can't find a good case study of the world getting better without leadership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I will often tell people, hey, think of somebody who's influenced you in a significant way and why, and you start to get the glimmers of leadership right, like you start to see, ok, who are the people that most significantly influenced you, and you start to get a greater perspective of leadership. You talked about some early advice. You got One of your early supervisors told you your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead, and you kind of hit on that self-leadership thing just a minute ago. But I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit. What is that look like in your journey, you know of just that capacity to grow, your capacity to lead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let me. Let me do a little bit of setup. I think the conversation is. I recall you're clouded by the midst of time.
Speaker 2:This was over 40 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the summary goes like this If you want more opportunity, if you want more impact, there's only one path, and it's lifelong learning, because your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead. I said, well, I want more impact and I want more opportunity. So like is that really the way the world works?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I made a choice which my parents wish I'd made many years earlier because I was a lousy student. But I'm thinking OK, I want influence and impact and opportunity and if there's only one path that I'm going to sign up for it. Now, somebody said to me not too long ago they said well, that's probably easy for you. And I said well, what do you mean? And they said well, I bet you're a learner, which was a reference to the strength finders. You know, one of those 34 strengths is learner, and I said you know learners not in my top five, it's not in my top 10.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's in my top 25. And they went well. That's crazy, because you act like a learner and I said well, thank you. I made a strategic life choice over 40 years ago because I wanted more influence, I wanted more opportunity, I wanted more impact, and so I'm still on that journey. Just finished updating my 30 year plan and just rewrote my annual plan for 2024 in the last month and just finished my 20 year publishing calendar. So that's amazing.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Yeah, so you spent, was it over 40 years at Chick-fil-A.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 44 and a half, counting six months in the restaurant. But I was awful in the restaurant. We don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 2:We probably need that story at some point.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, not today, not today.
Speaker 2:So how did you keep that hunger to grow and to learn, when I'm guessing that there were occasions where there wasn't necessarily a obvious next position for growth, or maybe I don't need to put words in your mouth, but like in 40 years of being in the same place, I mean so many times I talk to leaders and they feel like they need to bounce around in order to keep growing or developing, especially in their career journey. Well, what would you say to that? How did that growth look like for you staying in the same organization?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I would say I was extremely fortunate that the organization gave me the opportunity to hold probably 10 different roles over my career. I haven't counted them at least 10. And some of those were career changes. So I'm moving from. I started our corporate communications group, which I knew nothing about corporate communications, so it puts me into a learning curve. I ended up moving to lead our training group. I didn't know anything about training, so that put me into a learning curve. I worked in restaurant operations and our teams had responsibility for half of the restaurants in the chain. Well, I had to get on the operations learning curve. My group started our quality and customer satisfaction group, which I didn't know anything about. So the organization helped facilitate that.
Speaker 1:Sure, but I think it's a cop out that you have to move to keep learning and growing. I agree, there's just too much. It's just an easy answer. You know the organization doesn't own your learning and development anyway. That's right. You own it. There you go. If you can get an organization that'll help you, that's great, right, right. But it's your accountability. Are you learning and growing? You can't pass that off on somebody else.
Speaker 2:That's so big I can't. Yeah, I'll talk to a lot of young leaders that are again eager to grow and to learn, but sometimes they're looking for that person who's going to just give them the map, or, okay, now I'll do this, this, this and this.
Speaker 1:The guaranteed success plan. Right right, yeah, I do three things, I'll get a promotion. I do these two things, I'll get a promotion, yeah. And so I have some very old school advice that all the young people I know are going to cringe when they hear this, and some people may even turn off your show, but I'm going to go and say it anyway.
Speaker 1:Do I'm eager to hear it. Here's my deal. The most successful people I've been around for 45 years are those that focus on contribution rather than career. Now, add value and look for opportunities to add value and contribution. At least in my experience, and it's limited I've been selling chicken for almost 50 years but in our organization we look for people who are contributing and adding value and what you would find is when some people felt like, maybe to your point, they had maxed out in there area of responsibility, they would start adding value in a broader context, so volunteering for this and taking on this project and doing other things. And so the people that were growing their capacity and increasing their contribution, they're the folks that didn't have to worry about career.
Speaker 2:That is such a good word. I think that has certainly been my experience, but I, you know, I often it's not popular.
Speaker 1:It's just not popular. I mean again.
Speaker 2:And we all want the prescription right, like the easy route is the prescription for do this, this, this and this and you'll get promoted to this. But a lot of times I'm working with organizations that are smaller, in that they might have 25, 50, 100 employees and there's only so many seats on the bus. And so you know it's hard to promise anybody. You know you're gonna make director in this many years because it's just a limited number of seats. And so I love that focus on being a contributor rather than just the career trajectory, because again, I've seen that happen time and time again, even in my own journey of the opportunities and the things that presented themselves by just being willing to contribute in a meaningful and significant way and find other ways to grow your capacity. That's such such good.
Speaker 1:Every organization needs people that add faith. That's right, yeah, and so be one of those people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, be that, be that. So you're in a season of a bit of transition, leaving Chick-fil-A after 44 years 100 years, right, 100 years. And you lead an organization called Lead Every Day. What's been your biggest leadership learning in this season of life for you?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, as I reflect, even on the last 12 months I mean, I've only been out of the chicken for six months, but if I look back at the last year, I am reminded again, call it a lesson relearned Just if you can build a great team, you can do amazing things. And, as I've reflected on that, I've talked, I've coached leaders more than I would like over the years on this single topic Men and women who do really good work, but they think that's leadership and I said leadership is helping other people do really great work, and I have had the privilege to work on dozens, lead and be part of dozens of great teams in my career and I'm so thankful for that.
Speaker 1:But, I had a couple of the best teams of my entire life in that last run at the chicken and it just, it just reminds me when we can put people together and unified, it really good, gifted, talented people and bring them together to pursue a common goal. Man, we can, I mean teams outperform individuals Teams outperform individuals when they're well led, that's right.
Speaker 1:When they're built on purpose, right, those teams aren't going to drift through greatness either, and so I'm. I'm thankful for all of the teams I've ever worked on, but these last few were just so amazing. It's made me redouble my efforts to build a world class team here in my second half.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that those, the listeners that are listened frequently, they know that they I'm, I'm, I'm. Holding back my enthusiasm hearing you say all of that, because I think that was one of the startling realizations for me in my early part of my leadership journey was how much more fulfilling it was to actually help other people do good work and to build great teams that do amazing work, and that, you know, that really became, you know, in the early stages of my career, was all about myself, and as I got a glimpse of the power of team, it just completely flipped my perspective on it, and so I just love that so much.
Speaker 1:You let me quickly say it's a perspective on team, but it's also a perspective on leadership. I'm thinking about one particular conversation I can probably call up several others where a leader who had a team wants to talk about what he or she has done, and I said time out, what has the team done? It's like a coach talking about calling good plays. I'm going did the team score or not? Uh huh, uh huh. Did you call a good play? Right, yeah, and so it's not only a belief in the team, but it's a it's clarity on the role of the leader.
Speaker 2:That's good. Yeah, that's really good. I love that. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the challenges leaders are facing in today's workplace. What are you seeing? What are you coaching people around? Is it all that different? I'd love just your perspective on the current challenges in today's workplace.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there are a lot and we don't have time to go into all of them. So let me let me tell you what I think is the most pervasive global challenge that leaders are facing. We did some work a few years ago. We saw so many leaders struggling and we said how do we help? And these were leaders at all levels, in all types of organizations. And so we tackled this project under the banner of leadership effectiveness.
Speaker 1:And even early on, throughout the project, people would say oh, oh, oh, oh, you're going to help people learn to lead. And I said nope, nope, we're going to try to talk to the men and women who know how to lead, but they're not leading to their full potential. I said think about it like this Think about a major league pitcher who's having trouble throwing strikes. Now, chances are that person does not need to learn to pitch Right, they're in the major leagues, they've got the contract, they've got the uniform, they're on the team, but they've got to make some adjustments because they're not hitting the strike zone enough. And so I said we're going to try to help leaders men and women who know how to lead lead more effectively. So we went to work on this and what we discovered is the culprit is a toxic mix, and it varies from person to person, and even seasons of life will change this mix, but it's often comprised of things like business distractions, complexity, maybe some fear, maybe some fatigue, maybe even a measure of success. Anything that's impeding your effectiveness is part of this mix, and we ended up calling it quicksand, and we think there are far too.
Speaker 1:I would again. I think it's the number one global challenge that leaders are facing right now. Yeah, and when you get in quicksand, you've only got three options. One is to swim in it, and that is the instinctive go to response, because leaders are leaders and when the going gets tough, the tough get going and you just keep swimming, you just keep going. Couple of problems One is you're never going to do your best work. There's no gold medals for people swimming in quicksand, so you know you're not doing your best work. And two, it's exhausting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would even argue, some of this great resignation we've been hearing about. I know there are many factors, but I think one of them is exhaustion. I think it's leaders that are just. They've been swimming in quicksand, and some of them for a long time. So first option is to swim in it. The second option is to give up. You just quit. You might physically quit. If you stay with the quicksand metaphor, you might actually die. Yeah, even if you don't physically die, your hopes and dreams can be extinguished in a moment. As soon as you quit, you're done. Yeah.