How do you create trust in your organization? And how do balance trust with accountability? Can trust and accountability go together? Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Temte, and he shares with some of the concepts from his books that teach about building organizational trust and accountability.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Customer success creates a word of mouth funnel that no marketing campaign can achieve.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA, is the former CEO of Kaplan Professional, author of two books—”Balancing Act: Teach, Coach, Mentor, Inspire,” and “The Balanced Business: Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows,” and host of The Balancing Act podcast.
A thought leader on issues related to organizational health, continuous improvement, and workforce reskilling, his articles have appeared in a number of media outlets. Dr. Temte has also served in the following professional positions at Kaplan: president and global head of corporate learning, interim president of Mount Washington College, and president of the Kaplan University (now Purdue Global) College of Business and Technology. This blend of higher education and professional education experience gives Dr. Temte a unique perspective over the issues surrounding the future of employment and workplace relevance.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering how you create trust in your organization? And how do you balance that trust with accountability? And can those two even go together? Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Temte and he shares with us some of the concepts from his books that teach about building organizational trust and accountability. Now, Dr. Temte is the former CEO of Kaplan Professional. He’s the author of two books, Balancing Act: Teach, Coach, Mentor, Inspire and the Balanced Business: Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows, and he’s the host of The Balancing Act podcast.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:55):
Now, he’s a thought leader on issues related to organizational health, continuous improvement, and workforce re-skilling, which is why we wanted him to be on the program to be talking about this. His background includes being a president and head of Global Corporate Learning at Kaplan, an interim president of Mount Washington College and president of the Kaplan University, which is now Purdue Global College of Business and Technology. This blend of higher education and professional education experience gives Dr. Temte a unique perspective over the issues surrounding the future of employment and workforce relevance. So let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Dr. Andrew Temte.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (01:38):
My name is Andrew Temte. My title is founder and chief executive of Skills Owl LLC.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:46):
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here and really where I’d like to jump into the conversation is about your books that you’ve released and these concepts. And the balancing act is really where I’d like to start. This sounds very, very interesting about building organizational trust and accountability within your organization. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about these concepts and give an overview for your first book for our audience that maybe they haven’t read it yet.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (02:15):
My background, I’m a finance professor by training. The University of Iowa is where I graduated with my PhD. So my purpose in life is teach, coach, mentor, and hopefully inspire others. I spent oh, well over 20 years at the education company Kaplan, where I started off. I was the product of acquisition, so I had a small business along with my mentor and partner Carl Schweser. We built that business up in the 1990s and then sold it to Kaplan in 1999. I spent 22 years at Kaplan in various roles, both in professional education and higher education. Just over that time period, later on we’re going to talk about makes and misses, I’ve had plenty of both.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (03:07):
And my books are really the culmination of a 30-plus year career and wanting to package all of the learning that I’ve done and put it into something that’s going to last much longer than I am on this planet. So the concept of balance is where I ended up in terms of what the primary message that I wanted to get out because I learned the hard way during my career that absolutes are those non-negotiables are more rare than they are common, and most everything else is a balancing act.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:50):
Talk about this balancing act and how we’re balancing multiple things, and that’s one of the things that really was interesting to me as I was reading some of your material. It really resonated with me and understanding that kind of bouncing sometimes from one thing to the other to the other. So would you mind giving a little more detail on that?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (04:09):
So my first book is called Balancing Act: Teach, Coach, Mentor, Inspire. That book is all about a series of balancing acts that we play in both our personal and our professional lives told through personal stories, professional stories. So the first book is kind of half autobiography, half business book. The arc of the first book ends with an exploration of the balancing act between organizational trust. We all want to get along, we all want to rely on our coworkers and trust of the work that we’re doing is making an impact and accountability. And accountability is sorely lacking in many organizations today. If we had a weight here and we’ve kind of moved a bit too far on the trust side of the equation and let accountability slide in many organizations, and those two things really do play off of one another.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (05:13):
And in my second book that’s where I take that arc of this balancing act between everybody gets along, everybody is great culture, but we need to get stuff done. We need to move the needle from a performance perspective and we need to be able to hold one another accountable. And I answer the question behind how to affect that balancing act through the concept of continuous improvement, establishing smooth workflows, great communication, everybody knows what everybody else is doing, transparency, aligned incentives. So what I do in the second book is I really focus on that how. And I introduce a management operating system that individuals, leaders, teams can install in their businesses, especially after they’ve reached scale and the critical mass where maybe you’ve got 200 people and you started out with 20 and now not everybody knows who everybody else is and that kind of family, “family atmosphere” has trickled away and things are starting to get really serious. And so how do we move the business forward is really where the operating system in the second book comes into play.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:43):
As you’re describing that, I’m thinking of my own business when we were in a more of a startup type phase and we just had a few people, the trust was high and the accountability is in thinking about that relatively low, but probably because we were all just really close to each other, so we kind of held each other accountable just because we knew what was going on day to day. And as the company has grown, there have been less formal measures that were established that made the “accountability.” The trust was still high, but the accountability slipped. We haven’t been holding accountable.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (07:15):
So I relate to what you’re discussing there. And are there any examples or things you can share of an organization that you’ve seen? I’m thinking in my mind of a franchise company, right? We’re in the franchising business, we help companies franchise. Well for a successful leader that franchises their business, now they start franchising and all of a sudden maybe they go from a few locations and now they’ve got 50 locations. How do you see something like that with your book and management system impacting or applying to a situation like that?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (07:48):
I like to think of trust as a ladder. So you build trust one step at a time, you’re going up the ladder. Trust is building, building, building. And to break trust, all it takes is that one moment where Suzie didn’t give Billy what they needed in a timely fashion, or Suzie didn’t really understand the workflow that Billy had to do. And so Suzie’s over here getting super frustrated because Billy’s not giving her what she needs in a timely fashion. And neither one of them really understand one another and what they’re doing because the organization has grown because you’ve now got these 50 locations. If you don’t have the goals for the organization clearly articulated, if you’re not communicating those goals over and over and over again, if you haven’t defined the purpose of the organization, why do we all exist, what’s our vision, where are we all going?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (08:53):
What’s the organizational culture that we want to foster here? If that’s not all readily apparent to everyone, as a franchise grows and as you get more locations, especially if you get geographically dispersed and you start managing in a much more virtual setting, you must have smooth workflows established so that you can appropriately balance trust with accountability. It’s all about establishing clarity. It’s all about having smooth workflows. It’s all about everybody else understanding what everybody else is doing because if you break trust, boom, you’re at the bottom of the ladder and it’s awfully, awfully difficult to reestablish.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (09:40):
You mentioned this about having wide geographic reach as the organization grow, companies grow. And in today’s world, in this post-COVID world we live in, if businesses can be either a hybrid, or a home-based working environment, I just saw a study that said essentially workers prefer, right, if their job can be remote, they prefer that. No big surprise there right? I mean that was pretty obvious. The point is with that going on, how do you help continue that form of accountability in those situations and even keep the trust up in balancing those two, how do you respond to something like that?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (10:21):
There are many legacy management practices that are, they’re at play here and I will call them, or label them “boss behaviors” where there was a boss on the floor and they were looking over the shoulder of all of their people and they knew exactly what was going on. You kind of manage through pressure and being directive and controlling. In a much more diverse and especially geographically diverse environment where you have some people at home, some people in the office, it’s really easy for trust to erode that boss that’s playing off of those legacy behaviors, if I don’t see the work, it’s not happening. That can really drag on organizational culture and employee engagement. So it is really a transformation from a much more kind of boss like management behaviors to true leader management behaviors where you empower individuals, you provide them the autonomy that they need along with very crisp definitions of what the work is, what the workflows are.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (11:52):
And the expectations are and that the measurement of outcomes and results is also strong, incentives are aligned. And those are some of the key elements that are in my second book that allow geographically diverse and hybrid work environments to thrive. It’s no longer the case that the boss can say something once and expect everybody to get it because everybody was all in the same place and everybody’s eyeballs were locked. That’s a rare circumstance now. And even back in those days where everybody was together, one of the things that we’ve all discovered here is that change is hard. Everybody moves through change at a different pace and a different cadence. So even in that case where the boss was being directive and everybody was nodding their heads, inside everybody’s heads, they’re like, “I don’t want to do that. I’m not going there. I’m not engaging with that.” So empowerment, autonomy, crisp workflows, strong communication, saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, it’s hard, but a truly effective work environment in this post-COVID era is definitely attainable.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:21):
Fantastic. Well, as you’re describing that repetition over and over and over again, I’ve had some good friends in leadership roles describe their position not as the president or the CEO, but as the chief repeating officer, the CRO.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (13:36):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:39):
Well this great time, Andy in the show where we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we’d like to ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (13:51):
Many misses, personal side, on the professional side, I won’t bore you with the personal side. If you want to pick up my first book, you’ll get some of my personal misses in there. The thing I would put in the category of misses professionally, going back to this concept of change management was a previous version of myself as a leader where I was more directive, much more controlling. And I like to call it my “Andy said era of management where nothing happened in the business unless Andy said that it was so.” Well, I completely underestimated the change functions that each individual in the organization has.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (14:40):
Each one of us has a whole host of change management curves that we apply to all manner of settings in our lives. Sometimes navigating through change is easy, sometimes it’s really, really hard, but everybody is different. And I would say something once, I would expect that everybody got it and that everybody was going to be able to move through whatever change it is, an acquisition, a new product launch, whatever it was that they were going to move through that change at the same speed that I was going to move through that change. And that is just absolutely not the case.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:25):
Great story to share, thinking back before self-employment and running my own business and being on the other end where there was a version of a boss that kind of like an Andy said type of a boss. And remember going through some transitions that were challenging and it was difficult for my fellow coworkers at the time and all of the things that were going on. And we knew that once the information came to us, in most cases, the bosses had known for maybe several months or six months or a year longer. So they had kind of sorted through it already. And so that’s a great example and story. Thank you for sharing. Well, let’s talk about a make. You have a great decorated career and work history. I’d love for you to share a make or two.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (16:08):
For me, it’s been being in the right place at the right time. It’s not luck, it’s not if some luck, but I believe very strongly that you make your own luck through learning, education, creating, establishing, nurturing relationships in your life. So it becomes much easier to be in the right place at the right time if you’ve put in the work and the effort upfront to get there. A lot of the makes that I would say are in the business building environment. I didn’t do a lot in franchising, but I did work partnerships all around the world and acquisitions of companies of varying size throughout my career.
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (16:58):
So I look back at my career and there are a few standout acquisitions where we really got it right, the product market fit was there, the cultural fit was for the most part there. And the change, the ability to the group moved through the change management process was smoother than most because the fit was there. Everybody could see the why even though they might not have agreed with giving up some autonomy over here and joining a larger company. If you can help individuals really see the why through that repetition, through effective storytelling, you’re going to have more success than that.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:49):
Andy, how about a multiplier to maybe grow yourself personally or professionally that you’d like to share?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (17:56):
The multiplier in all the businesses that I’ve been involved in is customer success and you have customer success that drives a word of mouth engine that no marketing campaign can match. So helping to create these Yahoo moments in individual’s lives as an educator, as an individual who worked in the education field, that’s what our job was really to create Yahoo moments. I earned that degree. I achieved that industry recognized credential that’s going to help me get the, raise the promotion, provide more for my family. Boy, if you help create those Yahoo moments for others, folks are going to stick with you and promote your business. So having the customer front and center, back to our discussion of trust, balanced with accountability, in my career, I have seen it more often than not, then trust and accountability break down much easier when the customer is not front and center. As the company grows, it’s really easy to lose sight of who’s paying the bills and who really matters in the company, and that’s the customer.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:23):
Great. Keeping that customer success, that client success front and center. Love that. Well, Andy, as we bring this to a close, the final question we like to ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (19:35):
Again, my purpose is to teach, coach, mentor, and inspire. So success to me is helping others grow and learn. And doing that is true to my personal purpose. And so success to me is aligning one’s personal purpose with the purpose of the work that they’re engaged in. And if you’re an individual listening to this right now and your personal purpose is not aligned with the work that you’re doing, everything is just a lot harder than it needs to be. So we can all do better for ourselves, for our families, for our communities if we think about aligning our personal purpose with that of the businesses that we engage with.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:30):
What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you, connect, learn more about what you’re doing or maybe get a copy of one of your books?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (20:38):
So the books are out on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and wherever books are sold. Really everything that I’m is located at my website, which is andrewtemte.com. So there’s no P in my last name, so A-N-D-R-E-W-T-E-M-T-E.com. That’s where everybody can connect with me. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. I left Twitter, now X at the beginning of 2023 because my mental health was being challenged by all the doom scrolling, so you really can’t find me there, but that’s okay.
Dr. Tom DuFore (21:19):
As we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across it you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Dr. Andrew Temte, CFA (21:25):
Just reiterate that you understand your personal purpose and if you want to explore that more, on my website I have a personal planning guidebook that all of your listeners can download for free that will help with who am I, where am I going, what’s my vision for my future?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:47):
Dr. Temte, thank you so much for a fantastic interview and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is this concept of balance that Andy talked about between organizational trust and accountability. And he said, “In today’s world, accountability is really lacking. It’s on the weekend, the pendulum needs to start swinging back.” And he said, “You need to have balance between these two pieces of trust and accountability.”
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:16):
Takeaway number two is he described trust as a ladder and that you build it one step at a time. So getting things like your goals clearly articulated and creating clear culture and workflows to be established. Those are important parts of establishing and building trust. And as Dr. Temte also mentioned, that trust can break pretty quickly and you can fall to that bottom rung of the ladder very fast. So you need to be mindful as you’re going through it.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:44):
And takeaway number three is when he defined success, and I thought it was a great definition, he said success to him is when you align your personal purpose with the personal work that you are doing or others in your organization. So aligning your work and your purpose to have those two connect and go together.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:06):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win comes from when Dr. Temte talked about his multiplier, which is customer success. And he said, when the customer has success and you keep that focused and centered, it drives tremendous word of mouth and a word of mouth funnel that no marketing campaign can achieve. I thought that was brilliant and very well said. So if you keep the customer at the center of your focus as an organization, how is this winning for the customer, how does this work for the customer or for your client? And keeping that customer at the center and making decisions orienting around that customer, it creates this unstoppable funnel of word of mouth business that drives and sustains your company for the long term. I thought that was a tremendous win because that’s going to be a win for your customer. It’s going to be a win for your staff, your team, for your company, not just short term but long term.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:12):
And so that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.