The Disruptor Podcast
"The Disruptor Series," your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation, started as a periodic segment of the Apex Podcast. This is not your standard conversation around Design Thinking or Product Market Fit—this is the series that dares to go beyond conventional wisdom, confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking.
Our journey begins with intensely provocative dialogues that set the stage for the unexpected. With a focus on Experience Disruptors, Product Market Fit, and a host of other captivating topics, we bring you face-to-face with the ideas that are flipping the script on traditional buying and selling experiences.
But we don't stop at ideas; we dive into their real-world applications. "The Disruptor" brings you an unfiltered look into the lives and minds of those who are either being disrupted, creating disruption, or strategically navigating through disruption.
Our guests range from industry veterans to daring newcomers, all willing to share their experiences in shifting the paradigms that define their stakeholders' experiences.
If you're tired of business as usual and eager to question the preconceived notions that hold back innovation, "The Disruptor Series" is your ticket to a transformative journey. Tune in, disrupt yourself, and become an agent of change in an ever-evolving landscape.
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The Disruptor Podcast
Elevating Leadership: The Art of Handling Tough Conversations
"Managing confrontation is hard, leading through conflict is harder, avoiding either is not an option." - Andrew Netschay
In this Disruptor podcast episode, Andrew Netschay of Warm Steel Consulting returns to the show to explore his Leadership Mindset module on Leading Through Confrontation.
Andrew shares strategies from his Enter The Leader program, focusing on conflict management and negotiation—critical skills for today's leaders.
He emphasizes emotional intelligence, empathy, and awareness as foundational tools for handling high-stakes negotiations and challenging discussions.
Drawing from his martial arts and boardroom experience, Andrew offers actionable advice on navigating challenging conversations, maintaining relationships, and driving positive outcomes.
Key Takeaways:
- Tough conversations are inevitable in leadership.
- Traditional conflict management approaches often fall short.
- Andrew's unique framework combines martial arts and business insights.
- Mastering these skills improves client relationships and employee retention.
- Practical tips include developing awareness, building empathy, and disarming difficult situations.
Andrew also discusses his Conflict Management Workshop, a 95-minute session that arms participants with essential tools like ACE’ing Conflict (Awareness, Connection, and Empathy) and Disarming Speech techniques.
Leaders will leave the workshop better prepared to tackle daily conflicts gracefully and respectfully, ensuring long-term client relationships and team satisfaction.
About Andrew Netschay:
Andrew is a leadership coach with over 35 years of experience in confrontation's emotional, mental, and physical aspects. He helps organizations and individuals develop skills to navigate challenging situations and achieve their goals.
Learn more: Warm Steel Coaching and connect with Andrew on LinkedIn
Comments or Questions? Send us a text
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Enter the leader knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Hi everybody, I'm your host, john Kunz, and welcome to another edition of the Disruptor Podcast. For those that are new to our show, the Disruptor Series is your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation. We started the podcast back in December of 2022 as a periodic segment of the Apex podcast. Our vision was to go beyond conventional wisdom by confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking. Today we welcome back a guest that we had on our earlier show, Andrew Nitsche of Warm Steel Consulting, as this time we explore Andrew's leadership mindset module on leading through confrontation. We will discuss the valuable advice on the pitfalls and the mistakes many executives make when entering the ring high stakes negotiation sessions. Welcome back to the show, andrew. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Doing great. John, Thanks for having me back. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1:I have been having a good summer, although it's starting to feel like fall around here, it's starting to get cool again, Nights are getting longer and the days are getting shorter. I'm super excited to have you back on the show. I thought we had a great conversation on your Enter the Leader series of modules and your coaching programs. I thought we had a great conversation on your Enter the Leader series of modules and your coaching programs. I thought we'd have a follow-up session and talk about negotiations and your programs and some of the things you've learned over the years. For those that were not on our show or haven't listened to our show for the last time, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your education and your experiences? Feel free to start anywhere you want.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so quick recap my experience in negotiation and managing confrontation and conflict really started in a boxing ring.
Speaker 2:My initial goal as a young teenager was to teach mixed martial arts around the world.
Speaker 2:I was always fascinated with the physical aspects of managing confrontation, understanding the psychological components and then delving into the emotional components, because emotions drive your actions.
Speaker 2:After many years of training and many injuries, I stepped out of the ring and into the boardroom. In a variety of stressful conversations I drew upon my experience training in the martial arts and I started to see a lot of parallels and I found you know, hearkening back to the strategies I used when teaching RCMP law enforcement officers how to handle confrontation extremely valuable in handling tough conversations with either an executive team, shareholders, vendors, customers all tough conversations when you're responsible for a multi-million dollar project. In a nutshell, started off understanding the physical aspects, really got fascinated with the psychology and emotional aspects of tough conversations and that's what really spawned Enter the Leader, which is a coaching system, a leadership development program with a framework that prepares people for leading through tough times, because I don't think you need that much preparation when times are rosy, when the numbers are great and customers are happy and there is no dissatisfaction in your ranks. Those are rare circumstances.
Speaker 1:Speaking of tough conversations, those of you who may not know Andrew and I probably started working together I don't know 15 years ago by now on a project in Vancouver, canada, with a bank there. It was a data center strategy where we helped them figure out what they needed to do and where to relocate their data center. The real purpose was to get it off the active fault zone in the Vancouver area and move their mission-critical business systems more inland so they would be safer. We certainly had our share of interesting and tough conversations, but at the end of the day, both the client and our team thought it was a very valuable project. It went well.
Speaker 1:So I'm not only friends with the client, I'm friends with some of the people on the project itself. That was a lot of fun, absolutely All right. Well, I urge you and I beg you to write this down that managing confrontation is hard. Leading through conflict is harder. Avoiding either is not an option. I was hoping you could expound on that and how your approach benefits companies and their executives that provide this negotiation training as part of their leadership development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. People can't just shy away from those tough conversations. People don't like delivering bad news, but in the bad news there's opportunities to resolve issues. So I find that helping executives manage their emotions, understanding their stakeholders' emotions when they're delivering maybe not fantastic quarterly numbers, those are key skills you need to have, as we talked about. When times are rosy and everything's looking green, they're easy conversations.
Speaker 2:I got fascinated in confrontation management, negotiation management, when I started bridging the world from martial arts into business. One of my clients was top executive in a wealth management company in North America. He would share his negotiation tips with me and again, I was in my early 20s and I just soaked it up like a sponge. But I left those conversations thinking well, it's easy for him to do because his team manages about $4 to $5 billion worth of assets, so when he walks in the negotiation negotiation he has a ton of leverage. So I was always wondering well, how does a little guy like me, who's got very little job experience breaking into technology and business and I don't have five billion dollars under management, so I don't have that leverage how can I start enhancing my position in a negotiation where maybe I'm not holding all the cards. That was the genesis of what are some of the tools, the tactics that you can use when maybe you're not in that ultimate power position.
Speaker 1:You're working on a collaborative solution negotiations is sort of viewed as a one-way street right. It's like I'm going to get the best deal I possibly can, and I think what I hear you saying is in some cases, the guy you were talking to had a big stick. But I think, at the end of the day, successful negotiations is where both parties come out ahead. Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 2:Well, absolutely. If you carry the big stick in negotiation, you may beat the other guy into submission and close the deal, but chances are you're not going to be negotiating another deal when this one's up right. I think it's quite myopic to handle a tough conversation by just win or the typical win-win. A lot of people use that. Obviously you want to collaborate on a solution, so both parties walk away, wanting to come back in the future to negotiate future agreements. I try to look at it as getting on the same page.
Speaker 2:You can physically sit on the same side of the table with your negotiating partner. That's a physiological tactic you can use. Some people see through that when you're trying to build rapport. But if you can really empathize, you know, connect with the other person, show them respect, show them that you really understand their position, they will see you less as an adversary and someone who actually understands you know what their challenges are. Yes, you probably have to compromise, but if they see you as someone who respects their position, empathizes with their needs and challenges, you've got a much better chance of working out an agreement. It might not be quote perfect, you may not tick all the boxes, but you're going to be talking to that same person in a couple of years, when it's time to renew a license agreement or they have additional work for your team.
Speaker 1:Excellent. They have additional work for your team Excellent. It's funny the second podcast in a row where I've gotten down to the empathy theme, which is so important these days. You really got to walk in the shoes of the people you're working with. If you understand what they're thinking, what they're saying, what they're doing, what they're feeling the classic design thinking, empathy mapping kind of approach it really does build a trusting relationship because you really are walking in their shoes and they can see that. They realize that you're trying to help them, not just yourself. I think a lot of folks have these common misconceptions or make some mistakes or there's a number of pitfalls that organizations fall into when they're taking a more traditional approach to conflict management training. I wonder if you could allude to some of those that you've seen over the years.
Speaker 2:One of the pitfalls is expecting short-term ROI. You put your team through this training. They're not going to walk out as master negotiators and all of a sudden your profit margin is going to increase because all of your agreements are just magically 100% beneficial for your term. It doesn't happen that way. It is a skill you develop through practice and practice takes time. Managing the expectations of taking an executive team through this training it's not an overnight success story, but it starts building that skill set that only gets better with practice. So I try to get all the people with 10-hour seminars to find opportunities to practice daily with your family, your children, your spouse, buying a car, buying a house, just really practicing those empathy skills.
Speaker 2:The key pitfall is expecting a short-term ROI. If you avoid getting this type of skill set for your team, you may see some short-term losses, Because if you've got guys walking into negotiations like a bulldozer, you're going to have not very happy clients, customers or shareholders. So I would definitely say this is a long-term approach. Build a foundation, Encourage your team to practice. But, like I said, it's not an overnight success story. It's going to be benefits that you realize over time.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, it's got to take the long road. So many things today. Everybody wants something instantly, but how does someone get started? How do you get going? How do you get on a path that leads to long-term value, as opposed to just trying to hit a quick win?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say one of the foundational pillars of our framework is developing awareness skills. You don't need to take a two-day workshop on building awareness skills. Start watching people's body language. Start really listening to the tone behind the words when someone's speaking. Try to get an awareness of what is the other person talking about. When they're happy, what are they complaining about? Because they're giving you indications on their needs. Where they're dissatisfied. These are opportunities for you to start that conversation. Number one I would work on awareness skills.
Speaker 2:With those awareness skills, as you listen to the other person describing maybe a deal that went south, they're actually giving you some gold right now, potentially disarming them in a kind way, taking some of the landmines out of a confrontation or negotiation by you could start telling them what you're not going to do. So an example I've used before is, if I know I have a client who's really nervous about a project running over time and then there's licensing fees six-figure impacts if a project isn't done on time. I start out the conversation saying I don't want to delay this project. I don't want to talk about slippage. I really want to work on how do we bring this project in on time. So you call out the elephant in the room before they can start shooting at it. It actually works with family members as well.
Speaker 2:My 10-year-old brought back a report card. That wasn't that great. I started out with saying look, max, I don't want to talk about grounding you right now. I want to talk about what are we going to do to get these grades up? That lowers people's guards, because you take away what they're expecting to be a contentious point and you just start talking about where to go next. It sounds simple, but it really does pay off A lot of these things are fairly simple, but not so simple in execution.
Speaker 1:right yeah, exactly Cool. So I know you've worked with a lot of different organizations, people, program and project leaders over the years. What are some of the benefits an individual might get by taking on your unconventional approach to disruptive leadership for developing your methodology, and someone that wants to enhance communication and negotiations abilities?
Speaker 2:The more you practice, the more this becomes part of your comfort zone. Right, If you start feeling the tightness in your chest or accelerated heart rate when a tough conversation is coming up, try to refrain that to yourself as okay. Well, that is my signal to jump in. The more you do that, the more comfortable you're going to get. Standing on the other side of a really tough conversation is growth, because you start negotiating the smaller contracts and then work up to the multi-year, seven-figure contract. That becomes part of your comfort zone. So the more you practice it like a muscle right, you got to work at it You're going to be able to take on a greater load.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest benefits is confidence, because people aren't comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. If they could delegate that, they will. If they could delay it, they will. A delayed tough conversation can result in resentment. You're actually burying landmines in the field in front of you and you or your negotiating partner may step on them in six months to 12 months. The key benefit from my experience has been confidence Confidence to take on more. It really is personal growth. You can surprise yourself with how well you start navigating through tough conversations the more you do it tough conversations the more you do it, I could see.
Speaker 1:Confidence breeds trust by the client and trust breeds more work and responsibilities from your employer and your clients. People look at you again as the leader in the room and therefore will give you enhanced responsibilities, hopefully enhanced pay and all kinds of good things as you move on in your career.
Speaker 2:And it's infectious too. So that confidence you exude, naturally because you've walked through the fire, so to speak, negotiating a raise. If you hate doing it, chances are no one's going to come up to you and say, hey, you're doing such a great job, john, I want to top up your salary by 20% just because I feel you're doing a great job. That doesn't happen, right. So the more of those conversations you prepare for and go through, the confidence builds. And again, it is infectious. You see a courageous leader. You want to work with that leader. You see someone who's consumed by fear. That's not a team you really want to join.
Speaker 1:Right, awesome, all right. I always ask one final question before we get into the conclusion of the show. Is there?
Speaker 2:anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with our audience. One valuable lesson I've learned in the past year is really keeping an open mind to the sources of information as you prepare for a negotiation, to the sources of information as you prepare for a negotiation A lesson I learned, and thankfully it was a good one. I'll just give you the bullet points. A couple of years back, I was looking at buying a new vehicle and trading in my current vehicle. I test drove one vehicle and I realized it wasn't for me. I was going to go to the cross the street and look at a competitor's vehicle, but that salesperson sat me down and tried to do the sales pitch on me when it came to the trade-in value appraisal. I asked them to put that in writing and they actually put a very attractive trade-in number for my current vehicle. I thanked them for their time.
Speaker 2:I went across the street and I was talking about vehicle number two and in my negotiation with them I mentioned I had been across the street. Long story short, they stated both dealerships were owned by the same company and had to honor the trade and appraisal from car vendor number one. I walked away from car vendor number one saying I'm never going to back there, I'm more interested in that shiny vehicle across the street. I almost underestimated the value of spending an hour in that dealership, but that trade-in appraisal basically saved me thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:So that little nugget of information, which I did not think would have any value for me, actually was quite, quite important. So the lesson I learned is, when you're preparing for a negotiation, don't discount any tidbits of information you gather along the way. You never know you pull out that card during that negotiation. It may have high ROI for you. So just really have an open mind as you prepare for negotiation, as you learn more about what the other, what's important to that other person, because it can pay off big when it comes down to the short strokes, interesting.
Speaker 1:Great points. How can people get started with your leadership coaching? What's the best way? If they were interested in learning more about what you do with your coaching program.
Speaker 2:Fastest way, just go to warmsteelcom slash coaching. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I think there's only one, andrew Netshaw, on LinkedIn right now. Or look up Warm Steel, but yeah, the fastest way, warmsteelcom slash coaching. Up Warm Steel? But yeah, the fastest way, warmsteelcom slash coaching.
Speaker 1:Cool, and we'll of course put those links into the show notes so people can find them. You mentioned your conflict management workshop. I'm assuming that's one of the modules that you do as part of the Enter, the Leader program. Give us a little bit more on that as well, please.
Speaker 2:Again, we focus on the four pillars of leadership development and we start at the foundation, which is emotions, managing emotional states. We talk about fear management, awareness, internal and external, and we just work on strategies to. As a leader, you're typically breaking new ground, you want to take your team to a larger customer base, new services, et cetera. As a leader, you're responsible for growth and growth usually means fear for a lot of people. So we really hit a nail on the head in terms of preparing leaders for the fear and stress of leading, getting them armed with strategies that builds their confidence, which is infectious, and gets their teams really wanting to work with that leader.
Speaker 1:Spectacular All righty. Thanks, andrew. I took away some notes. Let me just sort of summarize them and we'll wrap this up. Here's some of the few key points that I made notes to remember. Tough conversations are unavoidable, but having a team trained to lead them with grace, compassion and respect will keep your clients longer. Providing this training to your team translates into higher retention of your top talent, less burnout of your team and happier clients that will stay longer and hopefully pay you more money. So that's what I took away, andrew. For those listening, don't forget to check out Andrew's leadership coaching services. The links will be in the show notes. Andrew, thanks again for sharing your insights into leadership development and revealing your genuine strategies for overcoming obstacles to produce. It's truly appreciated. I always love having you on the show. I always love catching up with you. It's been a great friendship over the years.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, john, it's been great. Really appreciate the conversation today Excellent.
Speaker 1:All right everybody, I'm John Kuntz. Thanks for joining us on this edition of the Disruptor Podcast. Have a great day.
