Episode 107: Brad Englert’s Take on Spheres of Influence | Build Better Connections

Brad Englert

Brad Englert is the founder of Brad Englert Advisory and an author, advisor, and technologist. Brad worked for Accenture for 22 years, including 10 years as a partner. He then served The University of Texas at Austin for eight years, including seven years as the chief information officer. Prior to Accenture, Brad held managerial positions in payroll/human resources and labor relations at the Internal Revenue Service, and was a high school teacher in Maitland, New South Wales, Australia. Brad earned a masters of public affairs degree from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor of arts degree in social sciences with honors and distinction from Shimer College, which is now the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

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 And I said, okay, give me some advice. He goes, get out of the office and let them know you give a damn. And that was the best advice. It wasn't going to be a question of if something would go wrong, it's when it goes wrong and how do we work together? Sent me an email and said, my son is applying for a job at the university. Could he talk to you? You know, I'm an officer of the university. Sure. I'll talk. But it was like, we had not stopped talking to each other in 10 years, get some time on their calendar and be intentional about what you want to achieve. 

So when I met with my customers or my peers, I would have an agenda beforehand. I said, here's some things I'd like to talk with you about. Do you have anything you want to talk to me about? And so before you show up, you're already thinking through the topics. I'd rather have them in the tent than outside the tent throwing rocks at us. 

And some people say, I'm too busy. I don't have time for that. You don't have time not to do that. Well, I think where we've started, which is to understand their goals and aspirations, set and manage expectations, and genuinely care, and if you do that in each of your business relationships, you'll be successful. 

You're listening to Prospecting on Purpose, where we discuss all things, prospecting sales, business, and mindset. I'm your host, Sara Murray, a sales champion. Who's here to show you that you can be a shark in business and still lead with intentionality and authenticity? Tune in each week as we dive into methods to connect with clients, communicate with confidence, and close the deal.

Brad Englert is the founder of Brad Englert Advisory and an author advisor and technologist. With over 40 years of experience in the private and public sectors, Brad brings great experience to us on the show today. His recent book, which we are going to talk about Spheres of Influence: How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships, offers a practical guide to help emerging and established leaders learn and perfect the critical hard skill of building effective and lasting professional relationships, which is right on topic for what we talk about on this show. So, Brad, I want to give you a warm welcome to Prospecting on Purpose.

Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me. 

I'm so happy to have you on the show. You know, I think that when I went through the book and I see your content on LinkedIn, it's very aligned with what we talk about on this show and this is, you know, some of my favorite things to talk about.

So I'm really excited to dive in. I want to just jump out the gate with, you know, you position building relationships as a critical hard skill. I think a lot of people bucket it into the soft skill category. So, talk a little bit about why you call this a hard skill, what makes it a hard skill, and let's just start there.

Well, the good news is you don't have to be born with the ability to develop authentic business relationships and, I believe that you'll be more effective if you focus intentionally and strategically on building a number of business relationships. And you will be more successful if you do that.

Well, and I think that that is a really nice segue into the way that your book is structured because I think that was my biggest takeaway as I was reading it, is you talk about strategically creating relationships with certain types of professional relationships. And your book is structured into internal and external spheres of influence. Can you break down those two for us, please?

Sure. The internal sphere of influence is those business relationships closest to you, be your boss, your direct reports, executive leadership, and all your staff, and the external sphere of influence is where you have less direct/immediate impact, but very important, that would be customers, peers, and influencers, and strategic vendor partners.

Well, I think it's kind of interesting that you have the peers as an external versus an internal, but I understand why it's broken out that way, once you start to think about the strategic webs, that peer may not have a direct influence on your role, but you still need to influence and work with them in some way and I really like that you talk about this concept of influencing too. Like, can I ask you, what is the definition of influence in your opinion?

Well, I think it's being able to understand what people's goals and aspirations are because that's where you start and almost everyone wants to share that. When I was the boss, if my direct report asked what my goals and aspirations were, I would freely share that. Same thing with them sharing with me what their goals and aspirations are. And then second, if I can help, it's the ability to set and manage expectations. Easily said, not always done well. And in fact, I had to learn how to do that later in my career. I got much better at it. And then third, genuinely care about their success. So whether it's your boss or your direct reports or a customer or a peer, it's how can you help each other be successful. 

So to recap that, it was – understand the other person's goals and aspirations, setting and managing expectations, and genuinely care about their success.

That's right.

Let's talk about it. So chapter one starts off with your relationship with your boss. And you had a couple of different times where you mentioned that it is your job to establish your relationship with your boss. And I think a lot of people flip that and think it's the boss's job to establish their relationship and communicate their expectations. So I really liked that you structured it that way. Let's walk through those three principles specific to building a good relationship with your boss. 

Okay. Well, the first thing is just to ask. It seems simple, but some people are scared to ask, and nervous to ask, but it's welcomed. It's a welcome conversation. I had a boss who had sales targets every year, and they got bigger every year. Well, we would talk about how could I help the boss meet those targets and make them successful. And if I didn't ask that question and know what those targets were, then I'd be flying blind. In setting and managing expectations, I had this type A partner boss, and she, everything was urgent, urgent, urgent.

And she called me one day, and it was about five o'clock. I was trying to get out of the office to have dinner with my wife, and she goes, 'Brad, I need a white paper, a white paper.' I literally said, 'Whoa.' I didn't say no, because that would have set her off like a rocket, but I said, 'Whoa.' Then I asked, 'Well, when do you need this white paper?' She replied, 'Oh, let me check my calendar. I meet with the client in two weeks.' I said, 'I thought it was due tomorrow! How many pages should this white paper be?' She answered, 'Oh, three pages.' I thought, 'I was thinking ten.' Then I asked, 'Do you have an example of a white paper that I could look at, you know, use?' She said, 'Oh yeah, I asked David from XYZ Corporation ten years ago.'"

Well, guess what? I went home. Before I learned to say whoa and get a little more time for some mental space and thinking, I would have called my wife, and canceled dinner, upsetting her and me. I would have stayed up all night and the next day delivered a 10-page paper that would have upset my boss because it didn't meet her expectations. So it's kind of a lose, lose, lose situation, but I was able to come in the next day. Give the assignment to one of my staff. They had plenty of time. We got it to the boss 2 days early and it worked well. 

Do you think that by you asking her when she needed it by, like, it sounded like it was panic, panic, panic, and then she paused and looked at her calendar?

Yeah. 

I think that's kind of a clever tool to just ask for clarity.  Instead of just trying to fill in assumptions because you think that's what your boss wants.

Right, and running down the field when maybe you're not running in the right direction. 

I think people do that a lot. They're spinning their wheels doing the actions, but not necessarily the right actions to move the task forward.

One of my direct reports at the university, I read the manuscript and she reminded me of the fact that I would often ask them to slow down and understand the problem, and of course, she's brilliant, You know genius level she'd zip to the answer. It's like don't zip! You know, let's really understand what the problems are and sometimes problems work themselves out by not doing anything. You know, so let's really understand what the issues are.

So then what are some other tips that people are listening, that they can use to  really build stronger relationships with their boss. Like obviously understanding the goals, setting and managing expectations and communicating. But give us a couple more examples on how we can help make our boss’s lives better or easier.

Well, the one I mentioned before is very positive, help them achieve their goals. There's also a need to not get them on any list that would make them look bad. So, You know, in a big firm, I have staff and I have to do evaluations and never be late on an evaluation. Cause that gets on a report and then it gets on the boss's radar, in 22 years, not once was I late with the time report.

Well, why is that? Well, it's a consulting business. It's driven by hours and expenses. If you don't file that report on time, you ain't getting paid. And same thing with billing and collection. You have to be on top of all your billing and collection. Cause at the firm, if you missed a month. They would charge you interest, you know, so that doesn't look good.

Yeah. So I'm thinking about it from like a sales perspective, like updating your pipeline, because if, you know, the boss goes into present his 10 person or her 10 person team and their pipelines out of whack, or it's, You know, a bunch of outstanding opportunities that get you on a list you don't want to be on.

I think that's a really great way to frame it. Avoid getting them on a list they don’t want to be on. So the other internal spheres of influence were executive decision makers and I want to ask you for a tip on that too, because I think when you're in a large organization or even smaller organizations, you want visibility to get promoted, so people know who you are, part of your personal brand and I thought it was really clever that you included that in, as an example of how to achieve influence. Can you talk a little bit about some strategies for people listening to build relationships with the executive leadership team?

Sure. Great way to prepare is to understand the organization's mission. What is the purpose of the organization? Understand the vision. Where does executive leadership want to be in five years? These are usually on the website. That's not a mystery. So just do your homework, understand what the values of the organization are, and then learn about the culture, you know, what is valued.

So at the firm, a big cultural ethos was building the team, building more partners, so we make more money and so you're expected to be a mentee and a mentor all the way through your career and a value on training. So, not a year would go by without you either teaching a class or taking a class. And 3 weeks before I was retiring, I was up at our training center in Chicago, 200 people from around the globe. I was there with other partners and we're teaching good old-fashioned project management. And it was such a joy because I had 40 years or 22 years of stories that I could share. And, you know, just, but you could not, not do that.

You could not, not be a mentor. You could not, not teach. And so, you know, understand the culture and the values. So when you do interact with an executive leader, you know where they want to be in 5 years, and if you can articulate that, that's just going to help you get a leg up. 

Right, and I feel like it's very similar when you're building relationships with the customers. Talk about the external stakeholders, the externals.

So I've been on both sides of the desk as a customer and, you know, it struck me in my eight years at the university, how many vendors would show up and not know anything about us. I mean, it's a public university, 54,000 students, 4,000 faculty, 21,000 staff. My organization's mission, vision, and values were on the website, but they would show up just and they didn't do their homework and it just was underwhelming and they would treat it like a transaction.

I had one vendor who's not a strategic vendor partner. They're just a vendor and they would show up once a year for their check. Their maintenance check. And it was always 10 percent more than the last year and didn't hear a peep throughout the year. Well, guess what? We replaced that company with a company that did care, had a much better product, was much more secure and they cared about us when we went live with their product, the senior vice president for sales calls me and says, how's it going? I mean, that is awesome. Because this was, you know, we're a big place and, you know, the fact that he took the time to reach out personally to me and ask, and we had a great relationship.

They changed our product to work in big organizations like ours and helped them, because they were able to sell into the big campuses as well. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. 

There are a couple of things you said that I want to double-click on. That's double click on you know, the kinds of the, I love that you have the experience from being both the seller and the buyer, because I feel that I'm learning that in my business too.

Now I am buying software as I'm, you know, hiring different teams. It is eye-opening to be the client. It's, you really see how I don't want to be dramatic, but the bar is very low for you to find out. And knowing how to build relationships, that's not that difficult to crack and so you made the comment about not doing your homework. And I think that that's so powerful. I was at a trade show last week and I'm at a dinner and there's a man next to me and he's a pretty top-level gentleman at a very large company, like a 13 billion dollar company. Publicly traded, same thing. 

You can see everything about his company on the website. And he tells me he had the worst meeting of his career right before the dinner, with a person, you know, with a vendor who's been doing business with them for a while and not a low-level person on executive level person and the guy's asking him all these questions about everything they could have found on the website.

Yeah. That's very frustrating. 

You're shooting yourself in the foot. You're wasting your meeting time too. It's just unprofessional. 

And it's how you show you care. You know, that you took the time to actually learn as much as you could and then think to yourself, how can my company help you? And if not, how could someone else help you? Sometimes I get asked for help. I'm not the one who could help, but I know someone who can and that pays forward.

And that's the relationship skill set too shining through. That you're, you're opening to them. 

For my customers, success breeds success. And at Accenture, 80 to 90 percent of our customers are repeat customers. Well, why is that? Because we built that trust. We delivered on what we promised and people like being successful and it costs so much more to get into a new customer than to just grow an existing customer. And there's some metrics out in the industry. It's like 50 percent more to get a new customer than a retained customer and that's where you build these relationships over decades. I had clients who I worked with years before, very successful. Well, I get called one day, and she sent me an email, said, my son is applying for a job at the university. Could he talk to you? You know, I'm an officer of the university. Sure. I'll talk.

But it was like, we had not stopped talking to each other in 10 years. But there've been 10 years and we just hit it right off. I knew her son when he was five years old. 

Why would he want to ask if, you know, the worst you could say is I don't have time. There's not a lot of risk there.

But yeah, from 5 years old to being an attorney, applying for a job, and he got the job. That's the wonderful thing, because I knew attorneys in higher ed have associations that they share all the policies, and our contract with, you know, Google came from, the University of California, Berkeley. We trade, we always share all that stuff. 

I want to talk about the strategic vendor partners because that was a really compelling area that, I think is a wealth of opportunity if people make it a part of their go-to market strategy. Before we jump over to that with customer you talked about doing your homework. You kind of layout like a step-by-step on how to build relationships with customers. And I liked this because, at the top of our interview, you said that you don't need to be a natural at building relationships. It's a learned skill. So take us through the step-by-steps of building a relationship with the customer. Step one was do your homework. What is step two?

Step two is get some time on their calendar and be intentional about what you want to achieve. So when I met with my customers or my peers, I would have an agenda beforehand.

I said, here's some things I'd like to talk with you about. Do you have anything you want to talk to me about? And so before you show up, you're already thinking through the topics. And then the discussion would be, what are you trying to achieve? How can I help you get there and if you don't reach out and ask that, you'll never know.

So I had a vice provost who wanted to change teaching and learning on a very, very large campus, and she wanted to record all the lectures and have class time be discussion time. Well, the tools we had to do that were bad. Actually, the tools was that company that showed up once a year and,  you know, You could not securely connect email to this tool, which is ridiculous.

Chief information officer.

So we had a group of faculty and students evaluate all the products. They picked the product. And over two years. My team and her team worked together to roll this transition across this huge campus. And after, the product was so good that there was a natural pull because the students hated the clunky old product.

They wanted the new one. But if I hadn't got out of my office and gone to meet with her, I wouldn't have known that And she probably would have been frustrated and, you know, trying to do it on her own. And so, you know, that's where, it's much more rewarding, frankly, to know you're helping.

Yeah, I think that came through in the book too, is this idea of, I don't want to say service, but like, genuinely caring about their success. I mean, that's every section you have to genuinely care about their success. No matter who the other person is. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Well, I had a meeting, my first week or two at the university with the professor I'd worked with 15 years earlier on a statewide network. So I'd been with the university 40 years, kind of crusty, and I said, okay, give me some advice.

He goes, get out of the office and let them know you give a damn. And that was the best advice because you can get so wrapped up in your work that you're not getting out there. And so I made a conscious decision to meet with my peers across the university, about 10 people every four to six weeks.

Like clockwork, just put it on the calendar, you know, it's nothing magical, just get the agendas out beforehand, and it was very intentional. And so, public safety, it wasn't going to be a question of if something would go wrong, it's when it goes wrong, and how do we work together. So I met every four weeks with the public safety Vice president.

And we talked about what would we do in certain situations. Our teams would get together once a year in practice, a night storm, power going out, cyber security attack, and believe it or not, one year, the power did go out. We generated our own power, and the backup to the utility failed. We were without power.

Well, we planned for that. During the bomb scare, I was out on the mall. Didn't have my computer. I just had my phone. Well, our standard procedure was, when there's a crisis, there's a common conference bridge. Everyone gets on it. It's hooked to executive leadership. We worked that bomb scare from the mall. So, and then things you won't anticipate and it's, if you have a working relationship, it's much better.

 Well, and I think that really speaks to the hard skill of it, Brad. You know, I have been in technology for a big majority of my career and I'm not an engineer. I wouldn't say that's my zone of genius, but I always knew who to get on the phone call.

Like there would be times, right? My only contribution to the meeting was holding up my cell phone. Cause I got the six people that needed to talk to each other on the phone call. And I had enough relationships to say, Hey, we're stuck. It's urgent. Can you give me a ring? So, but it's hard to quantify that and so I think from like a sales environment, it's hard for leaders to really put dollars on, you know, the connection point. Yours is such a great example. Cause it's, It's literal public safety. So it's a much greater stakes than if you close a deal or not. But I think that it's really helpful to reframe this as to why relationship building is so crucial and why we have to be intentional about it.

And some people say I'm too busy. I don't have time for that. You don't have time not to do that. Issues will arise and you don't want to be showing up with all these issues because then you're the one bringing issues. Oh, my gosh. And, there was, you're asking about strategic vendor partners.

Those. Notice I didn't say vendors, you have a lot of vendors, you know, spend millions of dollars a year, but there are only a few who are strategic that I want to build a relationship with because if I can influence their company to help my organization, it's a win-win. So it's pretty simple. Who am I spending the most money with?

Okay. Network, you know, certain vendors. And then I would meet quarterly with their sales team, the account manager, her boss, purchasing director, and his direct report. So all three, because all three of us have to make this work. And we would just say, okay, what are the initiatives for the year? What are some of the new products you have coming?

Any issues? You know, we're. Big bureaucracy. Sometimes we didn't pay our bills quickly, you know, so anything I can do to make the relationship better. And so we were building a 32 million dollar data center and we have budgeted for a line of network gear. Well, sure enough, as we provision that center, the next generation of network here came out.

That's what happens. 

And, and, you know, we just been working with this company for many, many years and you know what they did. They discounted it to our budget because they wanted us to be a great reference going forward.

That's cool.

Happy to do so. And that extended the life of that equipment by 3, 4, 5 years.

Wow. And you know what I think is so great about that example, Brad, is you're demonstrating from the client perspective too, that it's a true partnership. I think that if we can all kind of as a, just a professional workforce, have this mindset of partnership versus buyer-seller, you know, the pitches, the guys showing up once a year to collect their check, the people who don't do their homework, that's going to hopefully dissolve and be more of the exception, not the norm.

So I had someone. It's only that, software-sales manager, he had his team, their turnover was like 50 percent of their customer base. So they had a lot of transactions, but it was costing them a lot of money. And so he brought in someone like you and said, okay, do you know who your customers are? You need to learn about your customers.

You need to understand what your customers are doing. You know, be Prospecting on Purpose. And his retention rate went up to 80%. He had to replace some of the team because some of the superficial transaction-oriented people didn't want to do that. But he got the right team on board and they really turned it around.

I love that story. And I think the other thing that I got in every section was this concept and kind of like through line of humility and gave examples specifically around the art of apologizing. I would love for you to give us some background on why it's important and valuable, and then some tips on how and when we apologize to others.

Well, central IT at the university is 330 people serving 54,000 students, 21,000 staff, 4,000, you know, things are going to go wrong all the time. And a quarter million devices hooked to the network every day. You know, so it's, What I would say to my team is, it's not if things will go wrong, it's when they go wrong, and how we deal with those situations.

So we became much more transparent. If there was an issue, we would blast out a message saying, you know, here's the issue, we're working on it and then we would follow up with an apology saying, sorry, there was a disruption, the root cause was this. So. First, acknowledging you made an error, then saying what you're going to do to rectify it, ask for forgiveness.

There's an art to the apology. I had this email from a faculty member whose daughter was buying a computer in the campus computer store, which I was responsible for. And he sent me this message saying, I can't believe you're offering 1 dollar discount on a computer in your campus store. Well, I didn't know that and so, you know, I dug into it and it was actually, we outsourced the store to this vendor who four years prior had authorized this letter on my letterhead. So I didn't even know, it happened, but I didn't blame the outsourcer. I didn't blame it. I just said thank you for bringing it to my attention. I got to the bottom of it.

You are correct. I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened and it will never happen again.

Oh, my gosh, 1 dollar coupon code. What a funny thing.

It was embarrassing too.

You know, and that happens. And I think that there's like, the ability to apologize is really important. I think the art of accepting an apology and moving on is also a scale.

I remember on the peer-to-peer influence, we had a project I was working on in Los Angeles and it was a monster project. And someone from our corporate office made a mistake and they sent out the wrong pricing and it was a total accident. It's complex. Like, It sucked, you know, it was the wrong pricing.

So it was unfortunate, but then certain team members just wouldn't trust that guy for years afterwards. It's like, can we just cut the man a break? It was, you know, and I think that, but out of everything, it spoke more to their character and the person who made the mistake. And so I think that I really appreciated it in your book because I think there's a lot of power and strength to admitting when something went wrong, because it's Just part of life and part of business.

And, if you have a vulnerability, be vulnerable, I can only hear in one ear. So I would, when I first meet with a customer or staff, I say, I'm sitting this way because this is my good ear. I don't want to turn a deaf ear on you. And then, you know, over the years I say, am I on your good side? And it's like, no, it's my job to make sure you're on the good side. But you know, the fact that I was comfortable sharing that because they couldn't talk into this here and I wouldn't hear it. My doctor said, you know, watch for that because they'll think you're not listening to him. 

Oh, that's tricky for you. 

Yeah, because if I don't see, I'm definitely not hearing. 

Well, I appreciate you sharing that.

And  I really appreciate the way that you're establishing these leadership rules. Like it was such a nice blend of strategic and tactical throughout the book. So before we wrap up our interview, I want to ask you, is there anything that I didn't ask that you want to make sure we brought up in our discussion on just kind of leaving with understanding the spheres of influence?

Well, I think where we started, which is- understand their goals and aspirations, set and manage expectations and genuinely care. And if you do that in each of your business relationships, you'll be successful.

I think we need to like write that on a post it note and just stick it on our, on our computer because I like that so much because it's so simple, it's so clear, and it applies to every business relationship.

And I'd ask my direct reports, like I had 10 people across campus, they all had 10 people across campus they met with. So we had this network of like a web, a nervous system that we could get, You know, hear rumors, understand what's working well, what's not working well, but, you know, at 1st, they weren't sure why they would do that.

And this 1 direct report said, why are you asking me to meet with this IT manager? She hates us. And I said, well, I'd rather have them in the 10 than outside the 10 throwing rocks at us. And she started meeting once a month as we got better and more predictable and higher quality service. Well, the IT manager came around and became, after about nine months, an advocate. And her boss became an advocate.

Now, if we didn't get out there and meet with them, they still would be. And there was some bad behavior in the past. So they had a reason to not be happy.

I think that's such a great takeaway, too, for people who are trying to rebuild poor relationships, because it's something we find ourselves in sometimes and I like that idea of like the web or the ecosystem, like this ripple effect that you're creating with your spheres. I think it's so cool. I'm so grateful to have met you Brad, and to have you on the show. I love the book. So everyone go get your copy of Spheres of Influence. Where can people find you if they want to connect and learn more?

Well, I'm going to send you a link that people get connected to a free sample on my website, and I'll connect to where to buy the book and third, how to schedule time on my calendar. So I'll send that link to you. 

Awesome. I appreciate that, Brad. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And have a great one.

My pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening to the Prospecting on Purpose podcast. If you'd love what you heard today, subscribe to the podcast and please rate and leave a review for more info on me, or if you'd like to work together, feel free to go to my website, saramurray.com on social media. I'm usually hanging out at Sara Murray sales.

Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you next time.

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