Scaling With People
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Scaling With People
The Relationship Master Key: Building Spheres of Influence
Click the customized link to get a free sample of Brad's book, purchase options, and schedule time on his calendar:
https://bradenglert.com/scalingpeople/
Ever wondered why some professionals seem to effortlessly build powerful networks while others struggle to make meaningful connections? In this thought-provoking conversation, Brad Englert, former Accenture partner and CIO at the University of Texas at Austin, reveals his three-principle framework for expanding your sphere of influence.
Drawing from over three decades of leadership experience, Brad explains why understanding goals and aspirations forms the foundation of meaningful professional relationships. He shares candid stories about sitting down with direct reports to map their five-year career trajectories and how this seemingly simple conversation transformed his ability to develop talent. The discussion extends beyond theory as Brad reveals how this principle helped him identify potential CIOs within his own team and prepare them for future leadership roles.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Brad dives into his second principle - setting and managing expectations. Through vivid anecdotes about navigating demanding bosses and protecting personal boundaries (including an illuminating story about protecting a family vacation to Australia despite project pressures), listeners gain practical tools for maintaining healthy professional relationships without sacrificing personal wellbeing. Brad's third principle - genuinely caring about others' success - might sound obvious, but his implementation strategies, including building a network of 90 relationships across the university, demonstrate how systematic relationship cultivation transforms organizational outcomes.
Whether you're building a brand, leading a team, or expanding your professional reach, this episode offers concrete strategies for creating lasting influence. As Brad memorably puts it, "the people you're working with today might be your customer 25 years from now" - a powerful reminder that intentional relationship building isn't just good manners; it's career-defining strategy. Listen now to discover how these principles can transform your approach to professional connections and unlock new possibilities for collaboration and growth.
Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Gwen Vier-Curry, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR. So today we're going to be diving into three key principles of spheres of influences. These are the forces that shape your success, your network and your impact. Whether you're building a brand, leading a team or expanding your reach, understanding these spheres is a game changer. I'm super excited to have Brad Englert here with me to talk about these three key principles. Brad, welcome to the podcast and share a little bit about yourself to the listeners.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for inviting me. I was in the consulting field for 22 years with Accenture, and 10 of those as a partner, and then, after I retired, I got a call from the University of Texas at Austin, where I went to graduate school. They wanted some help developing an IT strategy and I volunteered hour-a-week pro bono. In October I was halftime by March and June full-time for eight years serving as the chief information officer.
Speaker 1:Hopefully not pro bono the whole eight years.
Speaker 2:No, I asked. I told them I needed to get paid starting at halftime.
Speaker 1:For sure, 100%. And so then you got into this evaluation, or how did you come up with these three principles to help people understand, kind of the sphere of influence that they have.
Speaker 2:Well, one thing that Accenture taught me from the very first day was that the people you're working with today, 25 years from now, might be your customer, might be your appear in industry. And, sure enough, the person I started with 25 years ago became chief information officer of a large entity here in Austin. The same year I became chief information officer at the University of Texas in Austin. So it's just building relationships at all levels of your career, with your customers, with your peers, because you never know, someday they may be a customer or your boss.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that's very, very true. So let's dive into it. What is the first principle of building your sphere?
Speaker 2:Understanding their goals and aspirations.
Speaker 1:So what does that look like? What does that mean? Do you have maybe a story you could share with the audience?
Speaker 2:So just take your boss. A lot of people are afraid to sit down and ask the simple question of your boss what are their goals and aspirations? And when I was the boss, I welcomed that conversation. I want my direct reports to know what we're trying to achieve, because then they can help me. And at the firm the goal was to grow the pie bigger more clients, more work. So I made sure that, one, I was making the firm more money than my salary, but, two, I was growing the pie bigger for my boss and that is mutually beneficial.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. And how does that work in reverse as the boss and your influence within your direct reports?
Speaker 2:Well, when I first got to the university, I took the first 90 days to really understand the culture of the organization I was inheriting and frankly, it was a wounded culture I was inheriting and frankly, it was a wounded culture, kind of fire drill, rewarding heroics instead of proactive customer service. So I sat down with each of my direct reports I had seven direct reports and I just said what's going well? What could we be doing differently If budget wasn't an issue? What should we be doing? And where do you want to be in your career five years from now? Do you want to be a CIO like me? If you do, then when I go on vacation I'll make you interim CIO or acting CIO. You want to be technical and not want to do that? I can support that too. We need all sorts of different skills and, you know, I think just this kind of leads me to the second principle, which is setting and managing expectations. And you know, not once a year with your direct reports, but once a week when you meet with them, and I would always meet with them in their office. Well, why would I do that? I get out of the ivory tower, I get to walk across campus, I bump into customers. I bump into students, I bump into my staff and their team. See me coming to their boss and showing respect and showing the flag, and I take time to talk to people. When I walk through the workspace With my boss, I had at one time a type A personality boss and everything was urgent.
Speaker 2:And so one day I'm trying to leave at a reasonable hour like five and the phone rings and it's the partner I need a white paper, oh, white paper. And she was just frantic and I said I literally said whoa. I didn't say no because that would set her off. I said whoa, when do you need this white paper? Oh well, let me check my calendar In two weeks. Hmm, okay, this white paper. Oh well, let me check my calendar In two weeks. Okay, how many pages should this white paper be? Three, I was thinking 10. Do you have an example of a white paper that I could use? Oh yeah, I asked David. I did one on XYZ Corporation 10 years ago. Oh, guess what? I went home, came the next day, found the staff person said you have a week and a half to do research and get a draft to me, and then we'll get it to the boss a couple days early Before I learned to say whoa, I would have stayed up all night delivered a 10-page paper and not met the boss's expectations.
Speaker 2:You probably would have yelled at me. So you know just, it's easy to do and I have to admit I got a heck of a lot better later in my career, because early in my career I'm trying to please everybody, and same thing with customers. I had a client that asked me to lead this project it's October, november and I said you've got all the ingredients for success. I'd love to do this. However, next summer I have a trip planned to Australia with my family and we canceled last year, which was my 25th high school reunion. I was an exchange student and so we bought the plane tickets. We have the passports for the boys. I really got to go next July and so things started going really well. We hit a major milestone in April May we're meeting with our monthly meeting with the president. I said, mr President, I want to remind you, as I have the last three months, that I will be in Australia in June, and his hands start shaking.
Speaker 1:And offline not working.
Speaker 2:Well, his hands start shaking and I'm slow motioning, canceling my vacation, Whoa. And the CFO says Brad, hold on, Wait a minute. Mr President, when Brad joined us in November, he asked if he could take this vacation. He wanted to go last year. It's important for his family. We committed to let him go. The provost and I we should let him go. The customer defended my vacation.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And so 10 years later, I'm meeting the CFO and his wife and my wife for dinner and we talked about that story and he looked at me and said we were scared to death when you were gone, but they, you know, because I set and managed expectations, I was able to have a vacation and they upheld their commitment. So you have to do the same with customers, and that's the second principle. The third is genuinely care about their success. And when I got to the university, I met with this professor who'd been there for 40 years. I worked with him on a statewide network design 10 years prior successful design and I said okay, give me some advice. He goes, get out of the office and tell people you give a damn. And that was the best advice, because you don't know what your customers need. You don't know what your customers need. You don't know what your peers need if you're in your office. And it's simple, it's really simple. And so I would get my calendar and I would look at my peers in the university public safety, facilities, utilities, blah, blah, blah. Vice provost, and I would meet with them every four weeks and just say what are you trying to achieve and how can I help you achieve that, and for the vice provost it was I want to change the way we deliver undergraduate curriculum. I want to record lectures and have more discussion in the classroom, but our current learning management system is terrible. Can you help us get a better one? And I said, yeah, that's something I can do. And so we issued an request for proposal. Ten learning management systems were evaluated by students and faculty. So they picked the solution. And when I took it to the executive leadership of the university well, what do the students and faculty think? Well, they unanimously recommended we do this. Well, let's do it. But if I didn't go meet with her, I wouldn't have known that She'd probably be frustrated with the learning management system, and you know I'm there to help them be successful.
Speaker 2:The other peer relationship is public safety. It's not if something will go wrong, it's when it will go wrong, and IT and public safety are tied together. And we had a bomb scare, we had a shooting, we had a murder. Over eight years, we once a year would practice a tabletop disaster drill. So what happened if the power went out? What would we do? Ice storm? What would we do? Cyber security attack? A year later, we had the power go out. You know we self-generated our power. The backup failed, so you know it's like we practiced and you had the plan Yep.
Speaker 1:We had a plan, preventive plan Yep.
Speaker 2:And then the bomb scare. I'm not on the mall with just my phone. I don't have a computer, I don't have anything. But our standard operating procedure was get on the conference bridge with public safety. They're connected to the executives and we worked it from the mall. Wow, yep, yeah, and they weren't going to let me in back in the building. Wow, yeah, yeah, and they weren't going to let me in back in the building.
Speaker 1:No kidding, yeah, and it's such a key thing there too, because I mean, we've lived through the pandemic, right, if you're a business in California, southern California, with all the fires, if you're in Northern Carolina with all the flooding, or even like the southern states, right with all the flooding, the hurricanes Texas has a lot.
Speaker 1:I mean you like the southern states right with all the flooding and the hurricanes Texas has a lot. I mean you said the ice storms right Like. When you said that, I thought instantly the turtles, but obviously people and property are a key there too. So making sure you have a game plan in place for all of these what-if scenarios a little doomsday-ish, but then you can respond and react really quickly. You've partnered with people, you understand what the whole org needs, in your case the school and the students.
Speaker 2:So I would ask my direct reports to do the same. Meet every four weeks with your peers and we built this network of about 90 relationships that every week we'd get a report back of. What are you hearing? How's it going? We'd get rumors sent to us. The public safety guy called me and goes I heard a rumor. You don't have enough licenses for the training software for the students. We need that because they're in the lab and federal requirements. We have to have a record of their training. You know that's a good rumor. I'll go check. Turns out we had enough licenses so we were able to just nip it in the bud.
Speaker 2:Now if we didn't have that two-way communication I wouldn't have known. It probably would have festered and blown up my direct reports. One woman read the manuscript, says well, brad, you forgot the time you forced me to go meet with someone who hated us. I said, well, I want them in the tent, not outside the tent throwing rocks at us. And so she started meeting with this peer who was distrustful because there's bad behavior in the prior group. And as we got better and more predictable and more transparent, that IT person became an advocate for us and her boss became an advocate, in spite of all that past bad behavior. And you know, we just said I'm sorry that happened, but we're not going to do that going forward.
Speaker 1:It's rebuilding the trust.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and just having that two-way communication, it's like a nervous system really.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now you know people say well, I don't have time for that, I'll just put it on your calendar. And it take customers. You have to meet with every customer. Who's your biggest customer, your most important customer? Make sure you're meeting with them, period. You know, yeah whatever cadence and you know some customers you should drop. You know you don cadence and you know some customers you should drop. You know you don't have to meet with all of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and some customers. Maybe you need to fire.
Speaker 2:I had that situation where we were helping this department and they had a guy who was kind of hybrid helping us, meaning when everything broke he'd blame us. And so I took her to lunch and she was a peer of mine and basically said this is really not working. And she looked up and said you're firing me, aren't you? And I said yeah, but I won't charge anything and you know. So it's just not working for either of us yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Vendors same thing. You don't have to meet with all your vendors, but who are the biggest vendors, who your most strategic vendors, and ask what are they trying to achieve and what am I trying to achieve and how can we work together to make that happen? Um, we had a built a new data center 32 million dollar data center. They had budgeted a new data center $32 million data center. They had budgeted for the old line of network here. Well, the new line came out and I basically said you know, it'd really help us to get the new line for what we budgeted for the old line. And they agreed to it because they knew we would be an excellent reference for them going forward and we would happily do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I see that it's so important. I mean relationships, building them, maintaining them, repairing them.
Speaker 2:It's key to success.
Speaker 1:Like you know, in the world of all the AI conversation we have these days, it's important to remember, as a human, the relationship is the key to many, many things. It's your master key to unlock a lot of your capabilities, your growth opportunities, involving people to actually bring things forward that you might not even think of yourself. Right, we can't all sitting like I think. What I keep hearing you say is don't sit in the dark corner by yourself thinking you're going to solve the world.
Speaker 1:You've got to go out and have the conversations, got to interact and engage with people and for those founders and CEOs listening, I think the key really is just knowing that when you're building that product or that service is to actually go out to who you'd be selling to and understand. You may think the problem you're trying to solve is A, but in actuality what really they need is X and Y. So making sure you have that pulse. I've had a few founders on the call. In fact, a couple of episodes earlier I had Hans who was discussing hey, like we had a pivot, like we had this whole thing that we thought was going to work. We thought it was going to go to this, like our ICP or customer base that we were targeting was this. But when we started talking to them we realized we're never going to get anywhere. So when we pivot to a different ICP, that also kind of recognize that we still need to pivot the actual product.
Speaker 1:And it's just, you know, the evolution of understanding who's your target audience and what is their pain points. What are? What would? Help them give them a breath so they can leave at 5 PM at night.
Speaker 2:Well, the two phrases kind of recur in the book. One is use your words. So if you're an employee, use your words. If you want something, you need to ask for it. If you want to take a vacation, you need to articulate that. And the other phrase is people are not mind readers. So if you're the boss, people cannot intuit what you're thinking.
Speaker 1:Overcompensate, over communicate, uh, you know but don't communicate differently, right as well I think, uh, there's um, uh, there's a I I don't the stats out there.
Speaker 1:It's something like people need to hear something seven or eight times before they really get it, which to me is like that seems a little bit overkill. And maybe some people need to hear it 10 or 15. I'm not sure, but you know, just reiterating what is going on and what you're wanting, what you're like you said, managing their expectations, managing your expectations, setting those and making sure that you're on the same page and aligned. And I think another thing you were talking about was the goals right and helping them understand what is the business goal and how do you achieve it within what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. There's a lot of resources out there that say a lot of reasons why people start to look, leaving from their employers because they don't have that connection. They don't understand how putting that screw in this door day in and day out is going to keep this product safe for your customers. Right. Keep the door on the, keep the door on the airplane kind of thing, right.
Speaker 1:That's important right. It might not feel like it, it's just a screw, but you know, at the end of the day and it's the same thing. It's helping people understand what they do, even if it feels monotonous or feels like, oh, if I was gone, no one would even notice, kind of thing. But no, you are an essential part of the whole production, of what we're doing, whether it's services or product or whatever it is that you're out there selling. Every role is key. You wouldn't have it if it wasn't right.
Speaker 2:So helping that employee. Sometimes you can't help someone, but you know someone who can help them. And that pays forward. They'll remember that.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I had a client call and asked me for something I couldn't help them with, but I knew someone who could. Yeah, and that was good. I found that as a leader, you have to use multimodal communication to reemphasize the values. I made the mistake early in my career of expecting my direct reports to tell their teams what. I was expecting, didn't do it. Yeah, some people were holding the information for power. Some didn't know they needed to tell the teams.
Speaker 1:Or maybe even how.
Speaker 2:Or how, and so I wrote a blog once a week for eight years talking about the values, acknowledging great service delivery where we had a success, apologizing for we had a screw up and telling this went to 330 people in my organization and 300 people around campus and other campuses interested in IT at UT yeah, and other campuses interested in IT at UT.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're sending the message, you're reemphasizing the values. We would have quarterly meetings where we do the same. We'd bring customers in and they'd talk about what they're doing. And we have those. This was hybrid before. Hybrid was cool because I have people in the data center and they can't leave, yeah, um, or people working night shift, so it's um, so we recorded them. But just, you know, every way you can. Oh, we had an orientation every month and no one could get on the shop floor without going through orientation. Oh, they try to slip away. You know, I'm too busy, I'm new and I'm scared. You know, can I spend an hour? Well, I had an hour a week once a month. I mean hour a month All my direct reports. There we talked about the values of the organization, our expectations of them as employees, and each director would talk about their major initiatives, and it just I kept a list. You could not not go to the Orientation.
Speaker 1:It's very important. So, brad, you got a great book. This is a great conversation. Is there anything you'd like to share about your book or how the audience can get to it?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to send you a customized link for your podcast that your listeners can click on and get a free sample of the book. Oh, awesome. Another tab how to buy the book or e-book or audio book. And the third tab, how to schedule time on my calendar.
Speaker 1:Great, awesome. I appreciate that, and I'm sure the audience does too. And again, thanks so much for joining us today, brad, and thanks so much for listening. Everyone Hope you have a great day wherever you are, and we'll see you on the next podcast. Thank you.
