Craig Andrews interviews Tom Kereszti, a leadership expert, who emphasizes the importance of people skills over technical knowledge in leadership. Kereszti, influenced by John Maxwell, believes that a leader's success is more about their character than their technical abilities. He advises leaders, particularly those in small businesses, to deeply understand their own values, passions, and strengths, as this self-awareness is key to effective leadership.

Kereszti underscores the need for introspection and feedback in developing a strong leadership identity, using personal anecdotes to illustrate his points. He also discusses the Maxwell Leadership Model, focusing on servant leadership and the importance of prioritizing team needs over personal goals. Kereszti's experience of firing a top salesperson for violating company values highlights the significance of upholding a strong ethical standard in leadership. These insights offer a concise guide for leaders looking to enhance their skills.

To learn more about Tom's work, check out their website at https://www.leadershipdisciples.com/.

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaskereszti/.

Key Points

Transcript

Craig Andrews 00:02

You. All right. Today I want to welcome Tom Kersetti. He is an industry influencer, author, speaker, advisor, coach and mentor. Tom is a former Fortune 500 C Suite executive, CEO and board member. As a C Suite leader, he has seen and done it all merging companies globally, restructuring and turning around companies, starting up companies, and even a few on his own dime. He is a Maxwell Leadership certified team member and has been mentored by John Maxwell himself. His servant leadership principles are time proven and based on biblical foundations. Tom's book, C Suite and beyond the Four Keys to Leadership Success is a must read and packed with stories of success and failure. Tom, welcome.

Tom Kereszti    01:00

Eric, thanks so much and for that grandiose introduction.

Craig Andrews 01:03

Yeah,

Craig Andrews 01:08

that's quite the background. And I don't know, let's kind of wind back. How did you get from there to here? What's kind of a quick flyover? What's been your life?

Tom Kereszti    01:24

Well, life's been my life. I always say life is a series of doors that open and close, and you kind of just use discernment. And for me, discernment and prayer to say, okay, which particular door do I go through and which particular doors do I pass? I would say the one common thing that I had to get to where I am today is really people skills. And leadership skills are really people skills. As I progressed about every two or three years, I got a promotion over a 2030 year career. And it was really always not because of my technical skills, but my people skills. And that's one of the things that I always suggest to individuals to say, look, when I say I ask individual, who are you? I'm an engineer, I'm an accountant, I'm an It guy, I'm a marketing person. And I said, well, that's very interesting. That's what you do, but who are you really? Right. So as I progressed through my career, about every two, three years, it wasn't because of what I knew, it was who I was. And that's where, you know, leadership skills, people skills versus technical skills. Another max story. A friend of mine kind of said it best. He says, we hire you for what you know, and we fire you for who you are. And that's very true. You hire somebody because of their sales skills or marketing skills or accounting skills, and then you put them in a leadership position and they fail because their character is not genuine, and that's where they fail that leadership test.

Craig Andrews 03:02

Yeah, and I think it's interesting because typically, first job out of college, you're getting based on some skill, some task that you can do. Rarely has somebody hired straight out of college for a leadership position. And so when you excel in that, that tends to be where you transition. Now you need a whole new set of skills to really grow and move up the ranks.

Tom Kereszti    03:28

Well, odly enough. My first job out of college was with Colgate, Palm, Olivan, and one of the reasons I took that job, because I was interviewed by Grumman Electric Boat and all kinds of because I was an engineer undergrad. So a lot of defense industry companies came down. I graduated from Polytech, which was now part of NYU, but it was an engineering school. And I remember this guy, Dave Benz, who I became friends with later on, interviewed me on college, and he started off my interview and says, tom, so look, we know you're smart. We know you graduated either because you got good grades or you were smart enough to cheat your way through college and got good grades. So let's get that out of the way. There's really no need to talk about your GP and all that stuff. I want to know what you like to know. Who are you? Like an individual? And that just resonated with me so well. And then when I went on to the job interview inside the organization, in those days, you didn't have Internet, so you couldn't kind of learn too much about the company, which you can today. But in every one of those interviews, whichever company I went to, I would pull people on sign and say, how's it being? Like, here? What's the work environment like? And I didn't get always a straight answer from some of the people that I asked, but what I colgate everybody said, I love working here. This is a great place. And that really swung the baton for me to actually work for that organization, because it was more about who I was. It was more about valuing me as an individual, people having a good time there. They were being valued as individuals. They weren't just a number in a large organization. So that's why I took the job. And again, as you go through your career and you understand who you are, and unfortunately, many people do not understand who they are. They kind of just punch the clock nine to five, and they don't know what makes them think. So as you go through your career, build those leadership skills, build that character that you have, because at the end of the day, people buy into you. That's who you are.

Craig Andrews 05:34

Yeah. Now, a lot of our audience is people that own small, medium sized businesses, and they launch the business on their skills. And I think one of the challenges is, as they grow their business, they're probably better at what they do that launched them into that business than the people that they hire. So how do you recommend that they move into a leadership role within their own company while seeing other people fill in the gaps for things that they're probably better at?

Tom Kereszti    06:11

Well, look, when I worked for large organizations, I would get people who had Harvard MBAs or Oxford MBAs come and try to work for me. And I kind of realized that, look, it's not really me that they want to work for. It's just the brand of the organization, whether that may have been Colgate, Pamala, Philip, Sonitronic Record Bankies. These are all large Fortune 100 organizations with great brand names, and people wanted to work for them. I just happened to be in a leadership position in those companies so people would want to work for me. And then I started my own company and I had this mindset of really hiring high flyer, high potential individuals. And then after the first couple of interviews, it became apparent. I was like, who the hell are you and why should we work for you? Right? Because I didn't have that brand. So I talked to a couple of people and they gave me some good advice and said, look, when you're in a small company, it's so essential that you have a very strong sense of who you are and what you're about and what you're trying to do, because that's what people buy into. You're starting up a new company. You're an entrepreneur. You don't have that brand name behind you. You're not a Nike, you're not an Amazon, you're not a Microsoft. You are a small company. And people are going to come on board because they buy into who you are. So have a really strong sense of identity. I always tell people, look, even before you start a company, and no matter what you do, answer these three questions for yourself. The first question is, who are you? The second question is, what is your passion? And a third question is, what are you good at? So get clarity on those three questions. So for me, I'm a servant leader. I'm passionate about making things better, making products better, making people better, making companies better, and I'm pretty good at leading and mentoring. So once you have clarity on those three questions, then start thinking about what company you want to start, what job you want to take, what do you want to do with your life? Because if you have clarity in those three questions, then I think you can begin to address your calling. So it's not a job. It's not a company. You're kind of starting to live your calling. And that's important for an individual because if you have clarity on that, people that will come and join your team will have clarity on that. And then there's all kinds of nuances on how you put a successful team together. We can talk about that. That's also part of the book. But get clarity on yourself because once you have clarity on yourself, then you may not be starting a company that you would if you didn't have clarity, just because you have a skill set. So that's my biggest advice for young entrepreneurs.

Craig Andrews 08:49

So if somebody's listening and they don't have that clarity, how do they go about getting it? How do you recommend they do it?

Tom Kereszti    08:58

Well, who you are as an individual, you start off with your value sets. You have values. Your values may be different than my values. Right. So figure out what your values are. Figure out I know people say Tom is a straight shooter. We may not like what he has to say, but he always tells us the truth, right? Where did that come from? Well, it came from when I was seven years old and I told the lie and my grandfather smacked me across the I said, oh, you know, it hurt. The slap hurt. But what hurt more was to see I pissed off my grandfather so much that he was because he never hit me. That was like, the first time he hit me today. Part of my character is I'm a straight shooter. I'm an honest individual. And that's where it came from. It came from those values way back then. So get clarity on what your values are. What is your passion? I don't know how there's no tips other than to figure out what you're excited about every morning. That's just by default. When you wake up every morning and you do things that there's some things that you like doing and there's some things that you don't like, just, you know, figure out what you're passionate about, because guess what? If you're putting team together and they see you're not passionate about something, why in God's name would they join your team? It's like, oh, man, tom is, like, so miserable. He hates doing this stuff. He's not passionate about it. Why should I be passionate about it? So that's extremely important. And look, the third thing is, nobody likes incompetence. So you may think that you're good at something, but get some feedback from others to make sure that you actually are really good at it. Right. Because we all think we're good at things, but maybe we're not as good as we think that we are at doing things. But you get some feedback, consistent feedback from other individuals to say what you're good at, then you can start piecing that puzzle together. I'm not sure if I gave you a direct answer. I mean, I don't know if you were looking for some kind of formula, but it's just life. Figure out who you are and figure out what your passionate about is.

Craig Andrews 11:05

No. And I think that was really good. I worry that there's a lot of people kind of walking through life that struggle with those questions. There's certainly a younger generation that has been brought up where their life has been scripted for them. It's almost I had an employee. Well, she worked for me before, she's working for me again, but she was talking about how her son was having to choose which trek he would be on in the 7th or Eigth grade. And I said, My goodness, we've become like Japan of the. And so we have a generation that's been told what to do. I'm wondering if they're having trouble answering those questions because everybody's told them what their answers should be.

Tom Kereszti    11:52

Well, there's an element of truth to that. I use my two daughters as an example. My middle daughter was always a high achiever. She went to Pace University in New York. Got a business degree. Unfortunately, in 2008, when she graduated, which was the height of recession, she ended up coming working in one of my small businesses for about a year, and then she kind of spread her own wings. But look, her first job, she had a business degree from Pace University, and her first job was driving a Red Bull truck. Red Bull had just opened their distribution, and they were looking for people to physically drive the truck, go into store to store, sell stock shelves, et cetera. I mean, she didn't need an MBA degree from Pace University to do that. But she kind of looked at the opportunities. She said, Red Bull is a pretty good company. Let me try to get in there. And she got recognized for what she did. And then she went over to Biter Cocoa, which is coconut, large beverage company. And then now she went over to Uber Freight and from Uber Freight, now she's in a different freight company as a high flying sales executive. So she was always focused, willing to do the work, knew exactly what she wanted to do, and climbed know, corporate ladder versus my other daughter, who was much younger, she graduated from LMU with a theater and dance degree because she was creative, right? And she hated living la. She hated that whole industry. And she found that her passion was climbing mountains. So then she used her creative genius and started making documentaries, had a large following on Instagram, posting all her pictures, climbing mountains and stuff. And my wife was always on her case. She said, look, you got to figure out what you're doing in life. You're not making any money. You're working all these shitty jobs. Look at your sister, whatever. And I just kept telling her, look, what's your passion? If this is your passion, follow it. Sooner or later, the dollars will cover, will follow. And so I kept encouraging her to figure out what she loves to do, and that's what she loves to do. She loves the outdoors. So she now does all the social media for kodiak cakes, which is, I don't know if you know, it's a pancake mix with a big grizzly bear on front of it. They have all kinds of other products, but they're now, I think, the largest pancake mix product in the US. And it's all about sends, you know, stuff with Zach Efron, who's one of their key spokespersons. So she's living a life. She loves her job, she loves the company, she loves her life. But it took about probably five, six years to get there because she was following her passion. She figured out who she was. She was following her passion and creativity was always something that she was very good at. So it was like, okay, just kind of pivoting that creative theater, whatever, into something else creative. And following her passion of the outdoors. Nicole very different. She was following her passion of sales and marketing. And mean, I don't know how they figured it out, but they did. And I think if you just take the phones away from the kids, take the phones away and have them figure it out what their passion is and you're right. Don't shove stuff down their throat that you should do this or you should do that, because they may end up going through, know, being miserable, doing what they're doing. So let them find themselves. Yeah.

Craig Andrews 15:27

Now, what is the Maxwell leadership model? People have heard of it, but for those that haven't aren't familiar. How would you describe it?

Tom Kereszti    15:39

Well, John Maxwell is unique in himself, that he's the kind of leadership guru, and he started off as a pastor, and all his leadership models are based on biblical principles, as, by the way, are mine. And Maxwell doesn't call it servant leadership, but I call it servant leadership. And what it boils down to is I tell people all the time, the day you realize that it's not about you and it's something much bigger than you, that's the day you can begin to think about being a better leader. So if all you think it's about you, you're in charge, you're calling shots. And if that's what leadership is to you, I can guarantee you that it's not a function of if. It's just a function of when you will fail. If you realize that it's something much bigger than you and it's not about you're only there to facilitate and lead and create an environment, then I think you realize what leadership is about and you can start working on that leadership model to become a better leader.

Craig Andrews 16:46

20 years ago or so, when Jack Welsh was big and in the news, I was reading a few of his books and he talked about how he didn't want to hire managers. He wanted to hire leaders that would energize a team that ran so fast they'd have trouble staying ahead of the team.

Tom Kereszti    17:04

Yeah, Jack, one of the first books I read many, many years ago was Straight from the Gut. That was from Jack Welsh. It was a great book. And that's really know, we talked about before we got into this podcast about culture force and the Seals model. I don't want to call them rogue teams, but the whole idea behind the Navy Seals teams is there's an overall mission, there's an overall vision that everybody shares, but then none of the teams get micromanaged. The kind of teams kind of figure out who their leaders are. There may be different leaders depending on what the mission is. And it's really just organizing themselves as a team to become self sufficient and achieve that goal, achieve that mission that they had for that one particular occasion. So same thing with Jack Welsh when you talk about leaders and having them become self leading teams. And John Maxwell says the three levels of leadership are the first one is you know how to lead yourself. The second one is developing followers, and the third one is developing future leaders. And if you understand how to develop future leaders, then you can become a leader of several teams. And then each one of those teams has leaders that you took time to develop, and you feel fairly comfortable that just by giving them some guidelines where they have a shared purpose, shared vision, they can figure it out themselves and leave them alone. Some leaders hire stupid people on micromanage them. Other leaders hire smart people and let them go. I like hiring smart people, give them the guidelines and let them figure it out. That's why you hire the smart people.

Craig Andrews 18:52

Yeah, well and I think one of the things that you have to be willing to risk is if you hire smart people, there's some level of fear that you may equip them or train them, create a platform for them to move on and do something else. And I think there's some insecurity in people that drive them to say, well, no, I want to hire somebody that is just going to come in and leave, but I think they're missing out. I think they're missing something. Would you agree?

Tom Kereszti    19:24

Well, I think the key word you use there is insecurity. That describes it to the exact problem. The person is insecure and they insecure themselves. I always felt that I would love to have somebody on my team that maybe one day I end up working for. And by the way, there's a guy who signed the back of my book. He's one of the guys Yuri. And Yuri was a brand manager that used to work for me many years ago. And then he ended up going and leading, I think, about a $1.5 billion organization. He was the CEO of that organization. So kudos for him. Great for him because look, I think John and I'm paraphrasing, I don't know the exact word, but since you're talking about Jack Maxwell, he said, look, what is wrong with having somebody who's bright and you train him leave you? I mean, the alternative is hiring somebody stupid and they stay with you. Which one would you rather.

Craig Andrews 20:31

I lost last year? I lost the person who ran my company when I was in the hospital for three months, and it was a huge loss. But when she told me what she was moving on for, I couldn't help but celebrate this move for it was a good move, but at the same time it was a huge loss.

Tom Kereszti    20:57

Well, I'm sure it was a huge loss, but I'm sure that's not the only individual that was on your team that had

Tom Kereszti    21:10

you again talking about Kyle and who's a good friend of mine who's a Navy Seal. He's got a book out and in one of the chapter they talk about how the Navy Seal model runs. And by the way, nothing I'm saying is confidential. It's in his book, so it's public domain. But one of the things that they do when they go through training is they walk up to the platoon leader and whisper in his ear, so you're dead. So now the platoon leader is dead. He's out of the picture, and he gets to step back along with the rest of the leadership to say, how does his team perform without him? Who steps in? Who takes the leadership role? And if it was a bad if that platoon leader didn't really develop their leaders, then that platoon probably fails, right. Versus if he took the time and developed multiple leaders, not just one, but multiple leaders, that team probably flourishes. And the same thing goes for business. I mean, just don't just take one person and say, okay, I'm going to groom this person, but take future potential leaders and groom all of them because you don't know who's going to be excelling. You don't know who's going to maybe leaving. So have bench strength, build that bench strength.

Craig Andrews 22:24

Yeah. That's so wise. Well, let me ask you this. Have you ever had a white knuckled moment where you felt like your leadership was put to the test? You were faced with a decision, it was a scary decision. You weren't sure how it was going to work out, what happened.

Tom Kereszti    22:42

If you're a leader, you probably had about 100 of them. But I would say most recently, I had a really good sales guy. And we talk about culture, we talk about values, and we talk about a team has to share those. And I say, look, your culture and your values are non negotiable. You can have all the discussion up front about what they should be, but once you agree on them, they become non negotiable items and everybody has to share them and everybody has to abide by them. And I had one of my top sales guys who violated that culture and values by something that they did. And I knew it's going to take a hit on me in sales, but I had to fire the guy because he violated that culture and values trust. And sure enough, it took a white knuckle moment because for the next six months, it took a dip in sales because this guy wasn't there. So it took a while to replace him. But yeah, just be true to yourself on culture and values. They're non negotiable because before you blink, if you think they're negotiable, then a couple of months down the road, you don't have shared values in a culture anymore.

Craig Andrews 23:58

Well, I would imagine by doing what you did that strengthened the team in the end that they saw that that was an important principle. I would imagine it gave them security, but also maybe for somebody, it set up a warning flag of no, we do have lines that you don't cross.

Tom Kereszti    24:24

Yeah, but it hurt the PNL. Yeah, well, you asked for a white knuckle moment.

Craig Andrews 24:33

Yeah. I think what I would say and you know this, I'm just sharing something with you that you already know. Yeah. That hurts the PNL but when you have the right organization, you can fix that. You can regrow that. Yeah. It takes time. And if you're a public company and you live by the quarterly report yeah. That's going to be really hard. But ultimately you can fix that. And one of the things that I admired about Steve Jobs, I don't think Steve Jobs was an exceptional human being, but he had some exceptional moments. And he used to tell when the investors would come and say, hey, you have to slip us some secrets. Let us know what's coming or else we won't recommend your stock. And Steve Jobs would look at him and say, if you're stupid enough to not buy Apple stock, that's up to you, but you're really going to regret it a year from yeah.

Tom Kereszti    25:31

Yeah.

Craig Andrews 25:33

Well, Tom, this has been really fascinating. I love the way that you've thrown out those ideas. They're very concise and pointed, and I think people will be able to listen to this and have some very actionable, very clear takeaways. But I'm sure there's some people that are going to say, but I want more. And for those folks, how do they reach you?

Tom Kereszti    25:58

Well, if you want more, a lot of things I talked about, and I don't want to self promote the book, but there's a lot of things I talked about that's in the book and a lot, lot more. So go to Amazon, look for C Suite and beyond. Four Keys to Leadership success. Read the book, it will help you, I think. If you don't want to read my book, read my buddy Kyle's book that just came out. It's also on Amazon. It's called leadership is overrated. And the easiest way to find me personally is on one, I think there's two chorestes or three korestes on LinkedIn. Me, myself, my daughters. So that's three of us. Those are the people that you'll find us. Caressi on LinkedIn. So pretty easy to track me down.