1075: Mastering Emotional Intelligence with President and CEO of Indispensable Leadership Group Darby Vannier

Robert Plank 0:01 Back on the marketer of the day podcast Darby veneer is here who has over 20 years of experience being a seasoned leader who is adept at building and growing organizations. Darby is the president and CEO of indispensable Leadership Group, which you can find at be indispensable.com. And Darby excels as an executive coach, consultant, speaker, and fractional CFO. And we're going to be talking today about emotional intelligence, about developing people about being a manager versus being a leader, and so much more. So are we excited to speak with you?

Darby Vannier 0:36 I appreciate being here, Robert.

Robert Plank 0:38 So we introduce you a little bit hyped up the audience. But in your own words, what do you all about? What gets you excited to jump out of bed in the morning? What are you passionate about?

Speaker 1 0:46 Yeah, I'm passionate about anything leadership related. So I'm very big on building strong teams and developing great relationships, both on the client side, but also on the team member side. Because to me, that's where everything starts. If I can build a great team, everything else kind of takes care of itself. So my career has kind of had diverse path, I will say I've done retail and nonprofit and for profit, and I've led companies and then lots lots of different things in different areas. But certainly key to my success has always been having a really effective hiring process and getting a great team built up around me.

Robert Plank 1:23 Wonderful. And you hear about this a lot, how there's, there's like the your your how and your process. But the who is way more important, because there are stresses, difficulties, unexpected roadblocks, and if you have the right problem solvers in place, then they can use their brain and they can communicate with you. And just by finding the right people and setting the right boundaries, expectations, knowing what your values principles are all those sorts of things, then you can avoid a lot of maybe even years of frustration of fine, like, you know, avoiding finding the wrong person. I'm sure there's a better way to say that. But that's just what comes to mind as far as leadership. And I don't know if this is like, just all the rage lately, or really hot, but just I keep on finding myself in all these conversations about leadership and how important it is, and just what's involved. And so is it just me, is it like, suddenly become all the rage on on LinkedIn and podcasting? Or is it just maybe I'm just more tuned into it lately?

Speaker 1 2:23 Yeah, I think it's always been important. It certainly depends on the market. Because when the market is an employee market, obviously, the recruiting efforts and the efforts of employers is much different than it is, unfortunately, when it's an employer market. But I would probably argue that the really good leaders aren't really changing their strategy, because I have always wanted to find the best people. And here's the deal, like, I'm looking for people who are going to be the best fit culturally who are going to be the best fit. As far as being a continuous learner and somebody who wants to grow and excel, I can teach a lot of skills, if they don't have quite all the skills that I need, I can teach those things. But you can't always teach that cultural fit. And inevitably, that's where the problems come in. And, and I haven't hit the mark, in all cases, all of us make mistakes. But in general, when I hire, I do a pretty good job of finding those right people. But of course, from time to time, there's always going to be those ones that you just didn't read quite right in the process or something. And in those cases, you just work with them and coach them along. And if ultimately, it doesn't look like it's gonna be a fit, I try to help those individuals move on, because I want them to be successful as well. So But certainly, I believe it has evolved over time. You know, 30 years ago, my father, when he's managing people is much different than it is today. I mean, back then it pretty much was much more based on reporting structure, a lot of companies were based more on reporting structure, and you did your job, and this is what your job is, and the boss tells you to do something you do it. Today, I think the most successful companies are probably companies who are getting people who are willing to think for themselves and willing to engage and want to actually be involved. Certainly, the younger generations coming up, are much more attuned to really understanding what their company is about not just what they do, or what they make, but actually what they're about. And I think those things have become much more important because they're not afraid. I mean, you know, this, they're not afraid to switch jobs every two or three years. It's a much different generation than even mine. But yeah, so that doesn't bother them at all. If they're not identifying with the company, they're going to move on. So finding those individuals who are excited about what you do and passionate about what you do, as well as being willing to learn is definitely important.

Robert Plank 4:42 I love it. And there's some good qualities in there, right that are built into this leadership idea. You mentioned these ideas like being willing to learn and being excited and being knowledgeable about what the company believes in and does not just what you're doing in your tiny little you know, your whole like, it's like if you were the janitor at Disney, you would say, Well, hey, here's I'm aware of what Disney does and what we're doing to change the world. And so is there a sort of like a checklist? Like if someone is saying, well, like, what's leadership? Do I have it? Or don't I have it? Are there things that if I, if I satisfy one checklist, I'm not a leader? If I satisfy the other checklist? I'm applying leadership? Yeah,

Speaker 1 5:24 I'm not quite sure. It's that black and white? Certainly depends on the industry that you're in. And it depends on the individual as well, because all of us have different strengths. Part of what I what I address in my book, is this this, this difference between manager archetypes and visionary architects. So sometimes you get asked when you're in leadership, I've been asked, and I've heard other people ask it, are you a manager? Are you a leader? And I got to start off my book by saying, I don't like that question at all. Because I know a fair number of people who would consider themselves managers, but they're also pretty great leaders. So by saying, Are you one or the other, you're saying you can't be both. So I basically ask people to look at it and say, Okay, let's look at it more of a an archetype. So a manager, characteristic type person and a visionary characteristic type person, which is what I really think people are getting at. So a manager type characteristic is that individual who is highly organized, they are generally the ones that are there creating lists of what needs to get done, they're talking about the how are we going to do it? And what are we going to do, they're the ones that are going to make stuff get done, that are going to accomplish things. On the visionary side, which is kind of the other end of that spectrum, you have an individual who is highly passionate about an idea, and usually multiple ideas, they generate a lot of ideas. These folks are usually highly entrepreneurial. So a lot of entrepreneurs you meet are high visionary, or fall more on that side. Because they do generate so many ideas. They're not necessarily always concerned about that. What are we going to do? And how are we going to do it, but they're concerned about why are we going to do it. So they're concerned about, we're creating this product, we're creating the service, we're providing this, because it's going to do this for all these people, and it's going to be great, and they have that vision and they sell it, the problem that you run into is you don't want to be another either end of that spectrum, you really want to kind of take the best traits of both worlds. Because if you're too highly managerial, you could be only concerned about checking a box and getting the stuff on your list done and not necessarily why you're doing it, which can be a problem. If you need to shift partway through a project or partway through a rollout or an initiative or something like that, it makes it much more difficult for that person to shift focus, because they're only concerned about getting their list done on time. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, with high visionary, you can also be way too high visionary, if you're just generating idea after idea after idea, what tends to happen with those individuals is they tend to overwhelm their teams, because their teams don't know where to focus. And they shift from one idea to another idea. Or another idea because the boss is saying, Do this, or they're saying this is what's important today. So they're shifting, well, what happens in those companies is is they don't grow to their highest potential, it's not that they don't grow, they will grow. But they don't grow as quick as they could, they don't grow as big as they potentially could, because they're not getting everything done. So what I am asking people to do is really think about this more like a Venn diagram with two intersecting circles, where you're trying to pull the best traits from both sides in and become the best possible leader that you can be. And I say it in that way. Because I can't make you gain certain characteristics, sometimes you're just not going to gain those. They're just not in your, in your realm of being able to add those things, we can add a certain amount of things, but there are some things, you just won't know that, but pull the best traits in and try to release those that are not so good. And in some cases, that means you need to hire a counterpart. So there are certainly highly managerial people who are really good at what they do who decide to start a business. Sometimes they have to hire a different CEO, like they could be a great CEO, but they need to hire a different CEO to come in and be that visionary, to build ideas to really push the ideas piece forward so that they grow. On the other side of that high visionary person. Sometimes they gotta hire a really good coo. You didn't have this case in some people that you would you would know. I mean, if you look back, even certainly somebody like Steve Jobs, for example. I think we all agree he was very high visionary, brilliant at what he did, and all the ideas that he came up with, but there's a reason he lost apple in the beginning of his career. He could not do the day to day management. And he did overwhelm people. I mean, that's it's well documented. So later on, he figured out I got to have people around me that helped me do this. And so he made sure that he had those people around him so that the stuff would get done that they can execute, didn't mean he didn't have still have very high standards and still want to do a lot. But he at least had somebody kind of pulling him back and slowing him down and saying, Hey, we got to do Do these 100 things to get to that point? We can't move on to the next thing until we accomplish that. So I think it varies based on who you are. And based on where you are, certainly I don't think there's a list, you can go check down and say, Oh, no, I'm a leader. Like, it's just not how it works. And certainly over time, as you gain experience, leading individuals, and managing people, those experiences help you become a better leader over time.

Robert Plank 10:23 I like that a lot. There's so much to think about it unpack in there. And it seems to be a more modern idea that everyone needs to apply leadership skills in their own context. And like when I was a teenager, and Boy Scouts, I got so frustrated, because they were like, well, either you're a leader or follower. And it's like, what are you really like, can't you kind of apply leadership in just a different way in everything you do, and that you are making the flashback a little bit too, sometimes clashing, where one person is the visionary and one person's the integrator, and they're either stepping on each other's toes or being too far in the other extreme. And what comes to mind is like if you were navigating cross country, and one person is like the the visionary like driving the car, and then the integrator was kind of like saying, like, do we have enough snacks? And should we stop for gas? And like, what exact route should we take? And if they're kind of conflicting too much, then that's when you have the real problems. And so what have you seen like in all of your years, and getting people to change their ways and do better and grow their companies? Like what sort of like success story or case study? Have you seen that can just really help us understand this leadership concept, and more importantly, the magic that you work in what you do? Yeah, I

Speaker 1 11:40 mean, using my own career, as an example, one of the things that I talked about is, is and I speak on this, and when I coach I coach around this, too, is the idea that you don't understand always what your impact is, as a leader today, on a person a situation. And I think that's important for us as leaders to remember that, because something that could be very insignificant to us at the time might be highly significant to somebody else. And here's the example that I'll give it's kind of a long story. But very early in my career, started my career, I worked for AMC movie theaters. So I was one of, I don't know, six or seven managers on the team. And you all serve as an operations manager. And then you kind of have an area and I took over HR. So I was in charge of hiring, we had a staff of like, 120 130 people in in a theater that size. One of the things you do as an operations manager, though, is is every Thursday, back then, at least nowadays, it's different with digital movies, but back then everything still came in on celluloid film. So on Thursdays, all the new movies would arrive for the openings on Friday. And all of those movies, then they come on, like about six or eight individual reels. And then all of those reels have to be essentially spliced together and built into one giant reel that would sit on this big platter, next to the projector, and then it would feed through the projector and it would go on to another platter and wind backup every time the movie was shown. So every Thursday, all of these movies have to be it's called built up. So all of these movies have to be built up and spliced together. So they're ready to go for the next day. And then all of the old movies after the movies are done late Thursday night, they have to have the process reverse which is being torn down. So they basically you have to go through the play, break all the spices and put them back on their individual reels. So whenever I closed on Thursday nights, I always after I was done with all of my closing duties, and the financial stuff, and all of that, I would go help the projectionists do all of this because you couldn't leave until everything was done. And I didn't understand just sitting around there were some managers who just would sit in the office and just wait, I never understood that. I always went helped. So this one night, actually morning, it was about two o'clock in the morning, I'm tearing down one of these prints. And I get it started and you basically have this table that you put the little reel on and you feed it on and then there's this knob that you turn and you speed up and it'll slowly start spinning and then it'll spin faster and faster as you turn the knob and the big platter spins. And when you get to a splice, you break it and then you switch reels and so forth. So I'm at the very start of this very first reel coming off. And the big spool that's on the platter, there's a metal center ring that has pegs that go down in the platter that hold it on there. And I get this thing spinning. I want to get out of here and I've done this lots of times before highly confident. And I get this thing spinning and it's spinning really fast. And all of a sudden I see this print just fly off into the projection booth. And if you've ever had those moments that are slow motion in your life, that's what it was. It was like I watched this thing slowly fly across the projection booth and land on the floor. And at that point, it's like all bunched up into itself. It's kind of hard to explain but you can't just pick it back up and put it on. It's kind of like If you ever saw the movie Christmas vacation, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with all the Christmas lights, that's pretty much what it looks like it's, you know, 1000s of feet of film that's all just bunched up in itself. So I spent the next four or five hours, pulling out pieces, cutting them on knotting it, pulling out again, splicing that back, pulling out the next session cutting that I had so many slices in this print. And here I am this kid, the beginning of my career, and I'm like, You are so fired, like this whole, five or six hours, I'm doing this, unlike, you're done. This is like this is it, you're done. I got done about seven o'clock in the morning, and got it back in the cans to be sent back. And I'm like, I'm sure we're paying for this print. And I'm it's 1000s of dollars per reel if you have to replace these at this time. So this is a costly mistake. And I went home, I showered and I came immediately back because I knew my managing director is getting in at nine. And I went into his office actually I stood outside of his office looking at his door having that thought of, well, here we are, we are here. It's time to get fired. And I went in I told him what happened. I explained everything like clearly the pegs weren't in it flew off. I explained what I did to try to fix it. And he looks up at me and he goes, Darby, I appreciate you coming in and letting me know, he's like, you're probably tired, go home and get some sleep. I'll see you tonight because I had to work again at four o'clock. And that was it. That was the end of it. A moment which I think probably if I talked him today, he wouldn't remember, it was probably insignificant. It was significant at the time, because I'm sure it cost our theater quite a bit of money. But he recognized that I was already high stress, I did everything I could do to fix the problem. And it was an honest mistake. But again, I think he would probably not remember this. But for me, it was highly significant. It created a small ripple that has changed how I lead have led my entire career. Not only that, but then I look at because it changed how I lead, I've influenced use that same influence. I've used that same story, as I've had people sitting across my desk when they screwed up. And I've said let me tell you a story. So that ripple has created basically a tidal wave of change in leadership in how I lead, but also how all these future leaders lead. And who knows if they keep using that story or using something like that, it'll continue to do that. So that's one of the things that I really focus on is is don't underestimate the impact that you're having on individuals, you have to think about those things. And that can be on the negative side, too. I mean, we all as leaders have difficult times when we screw up, and we treat somebody some some way that we we don't think we should have treated them or something. And I've had times in my career where I've had to go back and apologize to people and say, Look at did not happen, how I thought it was going to happen is not what I want to come out of this. And try to correct those things. Because if you don't, you could create that tidal wave in the other direction and totally mess up somebody's leadership style, or cause issues for them later in their careers as well. So no pressure, but definitely I asked people to think about those things, because you're having an impact even even in the most insignificant moments to you at the time.

Robert Plank 18:29 Wonderful think things through, have emotional intelligence, examine the situation, keep people's feelings in mind, and also know that the little moments matter. And it might be they might even be asymmetrical moments, right? There might be moments that don't mean that much to you, but then leave this lasting decades long memory in someone else, and vice versa. And so what do you think? Or I mean, we kind of explained it a little bit, but like, what do you think are like the lessons from something like that? Like, what do you think your manager was thinking? Like, I imagine he might have been thinking like, Okay, well, here's the situation, he did what we could, there's no changing it. And like I heard earlier, like your sort of logic of like, well, are things working? And if they're not working, have a conversation to change it. If it's still not changing, then maybe the person needs to go. But like we just what would you say is the moral lesson from a situation like that? Yeah,

Speaker 1 19:21 I mean, the big thing there is certainly what it did for me is it caused me to think about those situations, and understand that really, everybody makes mistakes. So as I lead and as I've encountered those things, I actually just had this conversation with somebody this morning. It's more important to me that we look at, okay, we made a mistake, something went wrong, whatever it is, first off, how do we fix it? Like let's fix it first. Let's move forward. Let's get the problem solved. What's it going to take today? This moment to solve the issue if it's a client issue, if it's an internal issue, whatever, let's solve the issue first. Then let's take some time and go back and have a conversation on how do we make sure this does doesn't happen again. And that's how I usually approach it at first, it's not about you did bad. That's not what I do. That's not my style. My style is is great. How do we make sure this doesn't happen? Again? Whether you did it, or I did it, or the team did it or whatever, let's have a conversation, do we need to build a process? Do we need to change how we do it God, we just need to focus more and spend more time is there some sort of something we can put in place to ensure some cases, there's not something you can put in place, it's just I need to think about it and slow down and do a better job or whatever it is. But you have those conversations, that is much, much easier conversation than it is in just basically telling somebody they did bad because they're not going to learn anything from that at that point. So I involve them on helping find that solution. Now, if you have repeated conversations of the same thing over a period of time, then that's a problem, then the discussion is a different discussion. The discussion then is, why aren't we changing this behavior? We have these conversations, why aren't we getting there? And then that's a different conversation, but certainly on a one off situation. It's really about like, how do we move forward? How do we learn from this? How do we make sure we don't do it again?

Robert Plank 21:07 That's helpful. Two different mindsets, basically, right? So that way, you can cut down the problem into smaller pieces, there's, let's fix the problem that's in front of us right now. And then what's more of their repeat behavior? And if the problem is both of those things, then fix the immediate and then get to that, or it might just be one or the other. And so that seems to be a more logical way of approaching this. Versus if you don't have the training and the insights like what you're talking about. It's too easy for the emotions to take over, which is this crazy, unpredictable, reactive, not really based in intelligent thinking. And we don't want that right. You want to be better educated and train. And speaking of that, tell me about your book, we already mentioned a few concept like this manager versus leader, but what is the book all about? Who's it for? And why should we be running together?

Speaker 1 21:59 Yeah, I kind of talked about what it's what it's about. And that is approaching that idea of really trying to find the best things to make you the best possible leader that you can be. And I talked about the manager versus visionary thing quite a bit. And then I talked about some individual traits, certainly, like emotional intelligence, I talked about that. I talked about mentorship, and some of the things that basically it was kind of all those things that as I looked back at my career, what are the things that I would have liked to have known early in my career that I learned throughout it that could help other individuals. So that really gets at who the books for the book is really for our newer leaders. And I won't even say younger leaders, I would say newer leaders, because there are certainly people who are further in their career, who they're just now getting into leading individuals, and that sort of thing. And this, this book is highly beneficial for those individuals as well. It's really a good basis for getting people the basis for building on some effective leadership traits and helping them move their career along and be great leaders so that they can build good teams. And obviously, the team aspect is very important. And I've covered that in there as well.

Robert Plank 23:05 Wonderful. And this whole leadership idea, I have to say like maybe five or 10 years ago, I every time I came across it, I would just come across the concepts, the key words, and I didn't really get it. And sometimes it's taken me just having many conversations or podcasts such as this, just to really warm up to the idea of thinking, Okay, well, it is easy to get lost in the buzzwords, but we think well, what does a good leader have? And we've all had, like the good bosses and bad bosses, or we've seen people that just really have character and charisma, and they communicate with others. And so it's like, if we find ourselves blocked with some of this kind of leadership, thinking or you think, Oh, well, that's not really that important to me. It's like, well, don't you want to get there? Don't you want to be like that manager at the AMC theater? Who said, hey, you know, let's, let's fix this, let's proceed forward. Or if not, then you might be destined to be one of those other managers as a kind of sits around in his office and doing nothing waiting for the employee to go and get the real back together. And so it's kind of like you choose one or the other. And we might have heard some of these concepts before, but it helps to get the repetition in and to kind of see it from different angles, and to see what our own strengths and weaknesses are. That way, we can finally make things work because you think about that, there's got to be some kind of saying, like, if you keep going situation situation, and things just don't work out and everyone else's jerk. Well, maybe you're a jerk at some point, right? Maybe you're the one who's the problem. If you find yourself no matter what, where you are in your career, or what kind of business you're building. If you always clash with the customers or the team, then maybe you need to kind of work on some of these people skills, and you probably do, but then there's also the assertiveness part and being able to kind of communicate with others and If If someone else on your team is like the bad apple then kind of know when to speak up and know how to approach things. And so it's a lot of nuance to navigate. But that's why it's so important to jump into a book like yours and listen to someone like you who's seen it, who has these very important lessons. And so what's the book called? How can we get it?

Speaker 1 25:20 So the book is called the indispensable leader. And you can search for it on Amazon too. But if you go to my website, you mentioned be indispensable.com. There's links there, as well as all the other information about my company and everything. If you want to connect with me, I'm most active on LinkedIn, you can just search for my name, Darby veneer, and you'll find me and I'll connect with most anybody. As long as you don't turn around and immediately send me a message to sell me something, then you might lose the connection, but the conversation after we built the relationship, but there's too many of those on LinkedIn.

Robert Plank 25:52 Yeah. And if you're just that much of a bait and switch, then maybe you really need the book to work on leadership and communication skills. And and no, because there's a right time in the process to do these sorts of things. You don't want to be on a first date and ask someone to marry you. There's a time and a place for that. So being indispensable.com Is that website. And then the indispensable leader is the book. And so you mentioned how someone likes the book, and they want to take the next step with you. That's possible. So tell me about your company, like what sort of service do you provide? And how does someone know if they're a right fit? Not just for the book, but for some of the services you provide? Yeah,

Speaker 1 26:27 absolutely. So we do executive coaching, as well as fractional CFO, integrator leadership. The main portion of my of my business is focused on fractional leadership. But I do some executive coaching as well. And certainly I have done those sorts of things. I've done some strategic coaching, which is a little bit different as well, it's kind of like, you're not ready to do that full blown, strategic planning, where you're spending a day or two at a time planning, but you want to have more strategic discussions. So I do those sorts of discussions, as well as maybe somebody that's not ready to kind of go into that fractional CFO space yet, and that sort of thing. And then I also do some speaking as well. So I'm leadership.

Robert Plank 27:08 Very nice and fun. So you mentioned executive coaching, strategic coaching and fractional SEO and that website is beindispensable.com be indispensable and then to find you on LinkedIn, especially on social media, the first name Darby de ar by last name, V A, N N, I, E, R. In this day and age, it is a little inconvenient to spell things but you never know if someone is just listening passively, or listening on a podcast. So it helps us spell those things out. Darby veneer be indispensable.com. And to wrap up our conversation, when it comes to your life lessons and trials and tribulations and leadership experiences. Do you have any one final parting words of advice? Do you have a quote or a saying of some kind, as far as leadership goes to really just help us out? Send us on our way.

Speaker 1 28:01 So my mantra is, has always kind of been and I say this a lot to teams that I work with, let's make the right decision and not just the easy decision. And the reason for that is sometimes the right decision, the decision that's going to move us forward and have the best possibility of growth or whatever, as an individual, as a company, whatever, in three years or five years might be a hard decision. It might be a hard discussion, there may be a way easier decision that gets us, you know, 5050 feet down the road. But if we want to go two miles down the road, maybe we need to just take the time and make the hard decision. Because it's the right decision. So make the make the right decision and not just the easy decision is my my mantra.

Robert Plank 28:46 And that's a great one. Right and we should be thinking about that as we go to be indispensable.com make the right decision, not necessarily the easy decision. Darboux Munir wonderful speaking with you. Thanks a lot, Robert. I appreciate it. All right. So we're