How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

Brandon Denmon [00:00:00]:
You promote people because they do a good job. Perhaps they're the best welder on the floor, so they should be the maintenance supervisor, right? Makes perfect sense. Even though they've been given zero management leadership, coaching, training, no delegation. So you still find them out there with their welding hood, striking an ard.

Kenny Lange [00:00:23]:
Welcome to the how leaders think podcast, the show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host, Kenny Lang, and with me today is the Brandon Denman. He is the founder and CEO of Peak Executive Solutions, a consulting firm dedicated to revitalizing small to mid sized businesses by aligning vision, values, and culture, which is desperately needed. With over 27 years of experience and a passion for outdoor sports, he leads with courage and confidence, helping teams find their unique part of their story, their why. Welcome to the show, Brandon.

Brandon Denmon [00:01:01]:
Well, Kenny, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, and I can hardly wait to get back to Tyler and see you in person. And I don't know if I ever even told you that my mom and dad went to school, high school in Tyler, John Tyler, if that's still a school there, I think, was the name of her.

Kenny Lange [00:01:19]:
It is. It's since been renamed as Tyler High a few years back. So our two main high schools got a rebrand. But, yeah, I know right where that's at. It's a man. It is a very, very small world.

Brandon Denmon [00:01:34]:
It is. It is. Yes.

Kenny Lange [00:01:37]:
Well, tell me, Brandon, what is on your mind?

Brandon Denmon [00:01:42]:
Well, every day is something a little different. And, of course, with all the political unrest, I'm trying not to talk about that today, but here's something that's been on my heart and on my mind ever since last week. Maybe it was a week before I got a question from a CEO I was working with about training middle management. And so the question I had for him was, really, who's on the front line, and what are you doing for them? Because what's on my heart, and I'm going to tell a little bit of a story. My backstory, I won't go all the way back to my parents being in Tyler, but I did grew up in Texas, Garland, Texas, to be exact. You probably know where it is. It's on the east side of the metroplex. And I grew up in a middle class family.

Brandon Denmon [00:02:26]:
My folks got divorced when I was in third grade. And the reason why I tell that story is my mom had to go to work for the first time so that we could pay the bills. Right. So what that meant was I had to hang out with my grandparents a lot, which was really super cool because my grandfather was a contractor. He built fence and laid flooring and pretty much could build anything the way I thought when I was a kid. But what that meant for me was I learned how to do industrial, mechanical, that sort of thing as a kid. And so, therefore, when I went to high school, I ended up working jobs like cabinet shops, machine shops, and that sort of thing. And so I really thought, well, this is really.

Brandon Denmon [00:03:05]:
This is really what's for me. But what I learned, probably more than how to work with my hands in those businesses, is that the way the business goes and the way the business feels really has more to do with how the leadership team treats the employee on the floor and the systems and processes they, they deploy in that business. So fast forward a couple of years, I figured out that maybe I wanted to go to school, and I had a mechanical mind and perhaps a little bit of skills. And so I went to engineering school and got a degree in mechanical engineering and came out of school, and I was looking for another one of those dirty jobs to do right, but perhaps with a little more brain power. So I went to work for a company out in the Carolinas that made brick. It was a family owned business, and it was a great business owned by a single family that wanted to automate, wanted to do some cool stuff and take some of the manual labor out of what we had to do. So I was excited about that. And about two minutes into my tenure there at what was then known as Eisenhower Brick, we got bought by a huge conglomerate.

Brandon Denmon [00:04:13]:
And the reason I tell this story is it truly changed my life, and not the way you're thinking, I'm pretty sure, because most people say, oh, my gosh, one of those huge conglomerates, it's going to be terrible. But what really happened was, is that this is one of those rare companies that's large, but really focuses on the people. So it marries back with sort of that, that belief I had from the beginning, that the way the business goes is the way the owner, the leaders treat the people in the business. So over the next, gosh, 27 years, my part in that business, in a lot of cases, was turnarounds after. After a merger or bringing the systems and the values and the culture to the businesses we bought that really belong to the company out of Australia I was telling you about. So it was super cool. It really aligned with, with where I was. And fast forward a bunch of years.

Brandon Denmon [00:05:15]:
We merged with private equity held business with the idea that we would go ahead and sell what we had rolled up into what was the largest brick and roof tile manufacturing business in North America. So we did that about two and a half years ago. And so I had to figure out what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I can't just sit around and twiddle my thumb. So I started peak executive solutions to do just that, to take a the skills and the processes that I learned working in this business for 27 years and help small and middle market manufacturers, but also kingdom minded businesses, create a place, a business where the people in the business truly understand their part of the story and why the business is something than just a place to make money. Right. And so hopefully that, that helps paint a picture of why I'm doing what I'm doing. You ask what's on my mind. It's really about the people.

Brandon Denmon [00:06:15]:
It's about the people on the floor. And so while my business, peak executive solutions, is to coach senior leadership teams in a business operating platform, it really is about the people that work in the business. And so back to the point about the guy that asked me the question, where does the training for the middle management come and how important is it? So that's really what's on my mind this week and trying to figure out how I help the middle management, besides telling senior leaders that that needs to happen.

Kenny Lange [00:06:53]:
Right. And I appreciate you sharing that background because I think so many of us in the coaching profession, myself included, we've seen examples of things done well, things done poorly, things done horrifically, probably have motivated us a lot more. But you've had such great experiences that you're like, okay, there's something here that can make this work at scale because to your point, when most people think enterprise, when people think at that, that large corporate, that conglomerate, they think we're just all about to be widgets in the, in the machine. Right. And so it sounds like you really got to witness an oddity. That said, no, you can, you can be quite large, you can be scaling and you can take care of your people, that you've taken it from an either or and you see the world as a, and the opportunity as a both. And is that fair to say?

Brandon Denmon [00:07:59]:
Yeah, I was thinking also, and you're right, you had, you got better words than me.

Kenny Lange [00:08:05]:
Well, I have a degree in speech communication. And so I'll give you the quote that I mentioned off before the recording for your wife. I'll take this quote back to my dad and let him know that that degree paid off. Now, perfect if you go and you tell anybody, hey, how you treat people matters, we gotta train middle management. I don't think you're gonna have too many people who balk at that, right. And say, no, man, you've gotta treat people like trash. And forget middle management. We just gotta focus on, on the big dogs.

Kenny Lange [00:08:40]:
Right. I don't think you're gonna find anybody who says that. But their actions seem to indicate that. So what do you see? Or what have you learned? Is the thinking, the prevailing wisdom behind those behaviors, even though they wouldn't say that, being neglectful or poorly treating people or punching down to feel better about moving out. Well, whatever those negative behaviors are, what's the mindset behind all of that, in your opinion?

Brandon Denmon [00:09:13]:
Wow, great question. My initial reaction to that is senior leadership knows that the rubber meets the road daily. Let's talk manufacturing for a minute. First meeting of the day starts at 05:00 a.m. they're firing at the machines and the supervisors or the foreman are really running the business, aren't they? Because the senior leaders are probably still in bed or still perhaps reading emails from the night before. The fact is approximately 20% of middle management is getting some form of formal training.

Kenny Lange [00:09:48]:
Okay.

Brandon Denmon [00:09:50]:
Okay. North of 50% of senior leaders are getting some form of formal training or coaching, and almost 100% of the frontline workers are getting training. So I think a prevailing thought process is new people need training because they don't know what to do. They don't know which widget to hit or button to push or knob to turn. And senior leaders need to become better leaders. So I think even in great companies that tends to be the case. And so you promote people because they do a good job or perhaps they're best at, they're the best welder on the floor. So they should be the maintenance supervisor.

Brandon Denmon [00:10:32]:
Right. Makes perfect sense. Even though they've been given zero management leadership coaching training, no delegation. So you still find them out there with their welding hood, striking an arc because nobody decided to teach them how to delegate. So I think the prevailing wisdom is people generally know they need to do the training, but there's either no, no budget, no time, the supervisor is busy, or we're super busy training the people on the floor to not get hurt or something similar.

Kenny Lange [00:11:11]:
Yeah. Something that occurred to me because I've seen and witnessed that as well, is it's, I feel like there's a, there is a dip in the middle in terms of training. Right? Like frontline or new, just from onboarding gets, it's very clear what the training is, what the outcomes need to be. So we apply this type of training or upskilling, and then executives get it because there's budget and they're really expensive to replace or what, whatever may be. But even your numbers in terms of executives getting training seems to me disappointingly low. So that's why you should all go out and hire Brandon. Let's bring that number up and Brandon lead the way. Maybe if Brandon's busy, then you can holler at me.

Kenny Lange [00:12:04]:
So something though, that jumped out at me and what you were saying is it's very, it seems like it's very easy for people to see why there needs to be training on a technical thing, right. When that, when we can physically see the output of the training. Right. Like, if your welds don't hold together, and I'm not by any means super knowledgeable in manufacturing processes, but I did grow up in the country, you welded.

Brandon Denmon [00:12:31]:
A little tractor part or two together.

Kenny Lange [00:12:33]:
Then I know probably jumped on one and broke it. Broken it with some friends in high school. But the, but the idea of, like, maybe at first your welds don't hold consistently, but then you get the training and since suddenly, okay, welds are holding and then they look better. Right. So they have a better aesthetic or whatever it may be.

Brandon Denmon [00:12:54]:
Right.

Kenny Lange [00:12:54]:
You can see that. But when you train middle management or upper management, senior executives, a lot of it is training on decision making, and that feels invisible. Right. Like, you can't directly tie this decision created this outcome. It's really like a series of decisions that lead to bigger outcomes that take longer to realize. Right, like you weld. Right. But you decide the latency, right.

Kenny Lange [00:13:20]:
Between the decision made and the outcome of it may be far. Like such a long time, we forget how to tie those things together. Is that something that you think holds water?

Brandon Denmon [00:13:34]:
Yeah. Well, there's no question. You brought up a whole bunch of different things, which I was thinking about this morning, which, I mean, there's a lot of things that middle management needs to be trained on, and most of it's not how to weld better or how to fix something that's broken. It is some of those things and the problems that arise, as you say, maybe there's a latency period or it takes a little longer to see, hey, we need to train on this. But some of it, I think, gets pushed off on issues and breakdowns where the root cause is really more around the problem solving, decision making, the delegation and the timing. So think about productivity and efficiency, critical thinking around just decision making and timely decision making, conflict management. So interestingly, the guy was talking to you last week was how we started this. That was one of the things that he brought up is that there's all kinds of infighting in one of his operations and the dynamics are toxic, however you want to say it.

Brandon Denmon [00:14:44]:
But the question I had was, well, what kind of conflict resolution training do your frontline supervisors or even your foreman have? And he said he knew they probably had some, but he didn't know when that might have been conducted. Like it wasn't a priority, perhaps.

Kenny Lange [00:15:03]:
Yeah.

Brandon Denmon [00:15:03]:
And that, frankly, they needed it at the senior level as well, he said, and the big problem is all my senior leaders are about to retire and I'm going to have to hire from the outside. Why do you think that is?

Kenny Lange [00:15:18]:
And I'm so glad you brought that up. That was, that was what was going to be my next question. So you're, we're here, you and I, we're trans. So, yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's venture into that. Because shouldn't middle management be that leadership pipeline for whether churn of any reason. Right. Mass retirement because the founding team is ready to step into retirement or something else? You have churn for one reason or another, but that alone might be reason enough to invest in training the middle management. It's the old, I forget God, who's credited with saying this, but someone said, well, what if we spend all this money on training them and they leave? And the founder guy said, yeah, what if we don't? And they stay.

Brandon Denmon [00:16:08]:
Yeah, yeah. And that's what happens. And that's what happens. And you end up hiring people from the outside. Right. But you got to do these things if you want to have a nice succession plan. And including this is going to sound. Yeah, wrong, but it is not wrong, in my opinion.

Brandon Denmon [00:16:25]:
But you've got to rank your people. You got to understand who's actually promotable or who's going to stay in a supervisory position and train that next level of leaders that are coming up, too. So there's space in all of that for people to grow and the people that leave, perhaps it's because they're not getting the training or they don't see that there's a line of progression. And I could tell a couple of stories here about some, some people that were in their mid thirties that were promised something and never got the training to get there, and they decided they were going to go somewhere else and they prospered in the other place and good for them, but it's really important. And I guess that's why I come at this from a senior leadership training standpoint, is because a lot of times the senior leaders are so focused on the board, the clients, the customers, that they forget that where the rubber meets the road is really what's going to make them successful over time. So, yeah, I've really been doing some soul searching on should I be developing some training for middle managers in addition to what I'm doing with the senior leadership team?

Kenny Lange [00:17:44]:
Well, let's explore that. Maybe we're going to help you here live on air.

Brandon Denmon [00:17:49]:
That'd be awesome. Let me get out my pen.

Kenny Lange [00:17:51]:
I do.

Brandon Denmon [00:17:53]:
Send me the recording.

Kenny Lange [00:17:54]:
Yeah, lucky for you, we're recording this. But I'd be curious, in your experience and based on some of the things you've been thinking about and conversations you're having, what do you think is substantively different between the training senior leadership teams need and middle managers need? Because you can make a case that a lot of it's similar and maybe it's the same topic but taught in a different frame. What are your thoughts about what's different? Is it just, or is it, we just need to train them all on the same thing and they'll be able to apply it appropriately for their, their level of leadership as they go? Or do you think it really does need to be something that is specific for those middle managers?

Brandon Denmon [00:18:52]:
Wow, man, that's a tough one. In general, leadership is leadership. Right. And so while the heading might be the same. So let's think about delegation as an example. At a senior leader example, let's just think the CEO who's the founder of a business, a growing business that's gone from 2 million to 20 million. And at one point, that CEO was doing the business development, coming up with all the ideas, perhaps even running payroll and as chief everything officer. There you go.

Brandon Denmon [00:19:30]:
I like that. And, and so what we would come alongside the CEO and say is, hey, we need to start taking some of these non value added but necessary items and giving them to people where, you know, where you can be more visionary at a supervisory level. I made the example earlier of the good welder. Right. That turned into the maintenance supervisor. At some point, you got to take away the welding hood and say, this is somebody else's job and you need to be planning, not executing. And so the answer to your question, I think, is it's almost yes. But how you, how you coach that and how you teach that might be just a nuance.

Brandon Denmon [00:20:23]:
I'm not sure. What do you think?

Kenny Lange [00:20:27]:
Look, I asked the questions here. No, I have. I have thoughts on this, too. I have a friend of mine, he actually had an episode released last year, Kevin Johnson. So anybody can go. I don't know what episode number that is, but anybody can go and look back at it with express pros training. And now they have since expanded to include senior leadership teams or executive teams or one on one executive training. But a lot of their content and a lot of their trainings are on the middle managers.

Kenny Lange [00:20:55]:
And some of it, and I did either sat in or facilitated some of those sessions. I was just. Kevin was selling a bunch of stuff and asked me to help out, and I was happy to do it. But it was interesting to me to notice one of the sessions is on, they call it making the transition. And it's exactly like what you're talking about is, you know, you. You're used to being on the floor, right? And suddenly now your job isn't to make that, that excellent weld. It's to make sure all of the welds are excellent. And are you managing, teaching, training, developing people? And.

Kenny Lange [00:21:35]:
And you've. You don't do everything yourself. You actually are doing less and deciding more, which, for people who are excellent technicians of anything, whether it's welding or you're just an excellent salesperson, because I think you and I could probably go on for the next hour or two just talking about salespeople who got promoted into sales manager but had no business managing people, or they were just poorly prepared for that position.

Brandon Denmon [00:22:04]:
Right.

Kenny Lange [00:22:05]:
And I didn't mean for there to be so much alliteration on that thing I just said, but I think my baptist upbringing just got the better of me. So amen, in my opinion. I think you're onto something in that leadership is leadership, right. Because you're dealing with people. But I do think the frame, I think the circumstances, the examples, the application of it becomes different. The weight is different of those decisions. The complexity of those decisions is different. And so I think if you can stairstep people honestly.

Kenny Lange [00:22:40]:
Okay, so I'm brainstorming off the top of my head right now. If I were to be designing my own curriculum, and maybe you and I, we should talk offline, collaborate, but I would be looking at what am I training senior leaders to do and reverse engineer into that. So that there was training, leadership development that mirrored the career progression offered to those who demonstrated high value alignment, high skill and competency, and execution is they're going to eventually need to know x, y, and z. Right. So how do we walk them there and say, okay, well, what would someone need to know to, like, what would we stack on top of this? This, this, this. Get to that place. Now let's find the appropriate place in the chart and line that up so that that becomes the learning and development program for them. Now, they may need to go around the mountain, uh, a few times, as, as my pastor used to say, but they're gonna get the exposure and the training.

Kenny Lange [00:23:55]:
And when they demonstrate the, that, like you and I teach within system and souls that healthy Fitzgerald. Right. That they're great values alignment. More often than not they're demonstrating those, but in a highly visible way. It feels them. They're making significant positive impact and it's the right time for the organization and for them to assume that higher level position. Well, suddenly now they've got a base of knowledge that's a little more easy for you to tack. The next thing on, they're going to have better retention, they're going to have better comprehension, and they're actually going to live it out of.

Kenny Lange [00:24:29]:
Because I'm under the impression that most leaders in most organizations have consumed way more leadership content than they are possibly executing. They're executing a fraction of what they know, which I'm not saying that is an indictment on anybody, but the percentage needs to change. It's never going to be 100%. You're always going to know more than you can execute. But if you're executing only on about five to 10% of the leadership skills and abilities and things that you know you are, like doing a disservice to your people in your company, your department and your team. And maybe what you need is less information. You need to understand, more application and execution. And to be quite honest, that's where I feel a lot of leadership programs fail.

Kenny Lange [00:25:22]:
They throw a bunch of at you, pardon me, but heap it on and then they're like, all right, now go do it. And you're like, how? Well, you just, you just, you figure it out. And I'm like, well, that is not helpful, Turkleton. So anyways, rant over. Thank you for coming to my, you got me fired up.

Brandon Denmon [00:25:44]:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I, I think it's important because I wrote down some notes here. I'm going to take that and call it my own. But I think the point you made there about it being some of the skills are very strategic and some of them are very tactical in the way you manage teams, in the way you manage a business, right? And so I wrote down a couple of notes here around accountability. Well, there's things you can do to help hold yourself and your team accountable that are not just because you're good at holding people accountable. It's systems, it's forms. Right. So some of this is quite tactical and just putting things together so that you're reminded of what you said you were going to do. There's strategic communications, where you just know what needs to be said and why it needs to be said.

Brandon Denmon [00:26:40]:
And some people are really good at that. And some people need to take a step back and think about what is it that I learned that's going to make the most impact here for this group and not just have a knee jerk reaction. And some of that stuff is, it's, it's intentional that you take the step back and think about it. But it's, it's very, if you can have a quick reaction. In fact, I test high for discernment, whatever that means, meaning I can make a quick decision, but that doesn't necessarily. People are ready to hear it in that moment. Right. And so it's having a little bit of emotional maturity, not necessarily intelligence, but to not blurt out what you know is the right answer immediately.

Brandon Denmon [00:27:26]:
And so teaching, that can be a challenge. Conflict management, delegation, communications, problem solving, those are all sort of different level kind of stuff. Right. And if you got a high level of emotional intelligence, some of that's going to come easy, but some of it's going to be real hard. And I don't know, just the way you said that, like, it's got me really thinking on that I want to do this now.

Kenny Lange [00:27:56]:
I love it, given that we were exploring some fresh ideas and things. So I know that the question I'm about to ask you is it may be more difficult to answer, so I might frame it a little differently, but if there's a middle manager listening or a senior leader who, who is also passionate like you, about seeing their middle managers improve and develop, what is short of hiring someone like, like you or, or me or one of our colleagues. Right. But they want to take a baby step towards developing those middle management skills in themselves or maybe in, in their middle managers. What's something that they can do in the next 24 hours with little to no money to take a step towards improving those middle manager skills?

Brandon Denmon [00:28:46]:
Oh, dude, that's a great question. How about this? Put up a board, call it three C's, concern calls and countermeasure. Put it up in the supervisor's office and teach them in five minutes, how to use it. Their employees are all allowed to write on it, what is the concern and what they believe the cause is. And then when they meet in the morning, I would like for them to come up with countermeasures and assign that to somebody else in the business. And this is the beginning of team problem solving. You can do that. You can put that board up and go to Walmart tonight and buy a three by five whiteboard, put some markers on it, and by this time tomorrow, you've got three things.

Brandon Denmon [00:29:34]:
You've got the beginning of team problem solving. You've got not just the fact that you're solving problems as a team, because that's true leadership and takes the burden off the supervisor, but it also solves the problem of employees saying, nobody ever listens to me. Okay, this is a big thing. That's at least a two for one. And the three for one is you can get started today for no money or for about 100 dogs. Ed Mars.

Kenny Lange [00:30:06]:
Yeah, I love that. That is fantastic. So go hit up your local Walmart or office depot.

Brandon Denmon [00:30:15]:
I'll send you a copy of one to put in the show notes if you want, please.

Kenny Lange [00:30:19]:
Yeah, that would be great that someone can go and download. Well, Brendan, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope everybody else has too. People wanted to know more about you. Peak executive solutions or maybe what are some other fresh ideas and concepts that you're putting out there and helping people with? Where would you send them?

Brandon Denmon [00:30:38]:
Well, they can go to my website, www. Dot peak executive solutions.com. i know I've got some links that you're going to post out there that people can get in contact with me and schedule a call. 30 minutes call and happy to have a conversation.

Kenny Lange [00:30:54]:
I will put all those links in there. I will tell you the listener, LinkedIn's phenomenal place. Brandon puts out regular content. He puts out a lot of just great short videos. You could watch one of those in the morning, turn it into your, your team stand up talk and claim you thought of it. But he's a great follow. So I highly, highly recommend. Yeah, get on there and follow him or send a connection request.

Kenny Lange [00:31:21]:
Well, if you got value out of this conversation or any of the other episodes, I highly encourage you rate review, like subscribe, whatever the right button is on the platform that you enjoy. One, it means a lot to me, is just feedback. I can start to see comments and things of that nature to improve the show, to make it more valuable for you. But also it's an easy way to pay things forward. You never know which of these episodes and conversations might be the key to unlocking somebody's next step in their leadership journey. So make it easy and get it in front of more people. But until next time, change the way you think. You'll change the way you lead.

Kenny Lange [00:32:00]:
We'll see you.