From Chef to C-Suite: Andrew Walbridge on 32 Years of Leadership Lessons

[0:00] From chef to 32 years as a student of leadership

Andrew Walbridge: One of my probably most used phrases in the workplace is, I don't know. People will come and ask me questions. Andrew, what do you think we should do? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I think we should do this. Okay, do you think that'll work? And so I kind of explore their thinking before I actually formulate a decision on my own.

Dan Korus: Andrew, thanks for joining us on the Kestryl Edge podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time to be here and joining us today. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself for the audience?

Andrew Walbridge: Okay, so my name is Andrew Walbridge. I am and have been a leadership, I'm going to say consultant, for the last 32 years. This is my 32nd year. I hesitate on the word consultant because often people say, are you an expert? And I am not. I've been a student of leadership for the last 32 years, and it has involved me helping other people develop their own leadership point of view as well. So yeah, I'm slightly hesitant about that. And I come from, this is where the self-confidence kind of takes a bit of a nosedive, because I started off as a chef. Obviously it was about a hundred years ago. And you just say to yourself, what does a chef know about leading people? My chefing years were excellent because they really taught me how to communicate, and I brought that forward into my work over the last 30 years. I've been lucky that my work has taken me globally and with some of the most prestigious companies you could want to work for. So that's kind of over and above that stuff. I love motorbikes. I travel around in this, my RV. I'm a reluctant DIYer and I'll do it when I have to. God, I've got another problem to fix. And I'm a parent. And a grandparent. I'm a grandparent as well.

Dan Korus: Congratulations, one of life's biggest honors. That's great. So walk us through some of your journey. How did you become a student of leadership? I think that's a humble title and also an accurate title for people who are studying leadership. How did you become a student?

Andrew Walbridge: That's the gray hair.

Dan Korus: How did you become a student?

Andrew Walbridge: So I fell into a job in the HR space, and this was back in 1994. 1994, I hasten to add. In 1994 I ended up working for a pub company here in the UK, and we had thousands, literally thousands of pubs. They wanted somebody to run a region of these pubs from an HR perspective, and they gave me the job, surprisingly. When I asked the guys that interviewed me, I said, why did you give me the job? And they said, well, we know you know nothing about HR, but you know how to talk to pub landlords. And that was it. I knew how to talk to people running their own pubs because I'd run my own pub for three years. I ended up educating pub landlords, pub licensees, the management estate of this organization. It's a company called Whitbread. It's not particularly a well-known company in the US, but it's certainly very well known in the UK because we've been a brewer and pub management company for 300 years. So yeah, I fell into it and I ended up educating people. And then I got snapped up by Warner Brothers. And that's not a name drop. I was being made redundant out of Whitbread, and I finished there on the Friday and I get a phone call to say, you start with Warner Brothers on the Monday? Yeah, right. Yeah, sure. And so I turned up at Warner Brothers and ran for them a cultural change program. They were trying to become really, really customer focused. So that was great foundations for me. Then in the early parts of the 2000s, I joined a US company called Blessing White, based out of Princeton, New Jersey. And I met my mentor, Terry Pearce, who was the author of Leading Out Loud, and I just learned a shed load from Terry. He helped me through. He stayed my mentor up until 2019 when suddenly he passed away. So I've been learning on the job, delivering and learning at the same time. Kind of a quite a selfish relationship.

Dan Korus: Well, not quite.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, I'll teach you guys a little bit about leadership as long as I learn something.

Dan Korus: Right. Not selfish. I think it sounds like you're very humble and people reached out to you for good reasons. So tell us a little bit more about what sort of cultural change you were leading at Warner Brothers. Obviously they picked you for some reason, there was some reason why they reached out, and what sort of culture were you changing?

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah. I'm gonna resist the temptation to be very self-deprecating. Why me? I think because I asked them a question. I was in a meeting with some guy, very senior guy from Warner Brothers who lived and worked down at Burbank in Los Angeles. And I sat in a meeting very early on. That meeting went on for three hours, and at the end of it, this guy went around the room and said, any thoughts, what are you thinking? Any thoughts, what are you thinking? And it came to me and he said, Andrew, have you got any thoughts? I know you've only been with us for five minutes, but what's your take? And I said, well, to be honest, I'm slightly surprised that we've talked about the business for the last three hours and not once has anybody mentioned a customer. And that surprised me. And they said, go on, tell me more. And I said, the reason I go to the cinema or the reason I choose where to go to the cinema is I go to the nearest one. I'd be expecting you, [UK MD], to be saying, how can I get my customers to drive past the showcase, past the Odeon, past the UCI and drive to a Warner Brothers theatre rather than just going to the nearest one. And that was the thing that kicked off the whole cultural change programme because they said, well, how do we do that? I don't know. And so we followed a structure. I followed a book by Jim Clemmer called Firing on All Cylinders. Great book. It's a bit of a tome. And we just implemented that and the project took 18 months. And then I basically made myself, put myself out of a job, which was fine. Had a lot of fun doing it. I think we changed the experience that customers get when they go to the theater. Rather than just some guy tearing your ticket and selling you a skip full of popcorn and a dustbin full of Coke. They wanted to have a real experience. It doesn't matter whether you're watching James Bond or Harry Potter. You want to have an experience. So that's why I think they chose me.

[7:00] What makes a change project succeed, and when to walk away

Dan Korus: That's outstanding. And what was the hardest part of implementing that? Thinking back, and you doing well enough at your job that you make yourself obsolete, I think is the role of leadership. Because the goal is to not be needed, is to impact change and make it so that people can lead in your absence, and that if you disappear, the right things still happen without you. So I think the highest form of leadership occurred there. What were some of the challenges that you overcame, and if someone was gonna go do an 18-month change again to focus on the customer in this day and age, what would be your advice there?

Andrew Walbridge: It is to know when and how to step away, because it kind of became my baby. Obviously it belongs to the executive team, but it kind of became my baby, and I didn't really put in place a plan for how am I going to let go the reins of this thing and how am I going to give my baby to somebody else to look after? And I think that was the hardest part. To say, hey guys, you don't need me anymore. Because I've got you this far. We've been trying to turn this huge ship around. I've got you this far. You now need to take over and do it for yourselves because it's your company. When you run a project, it's knowing at which point and how you're gonna step away. And I think you're right, it is a great signal of good leadership by making yourself essentially superfluous to requirements. But I think you need to think about that early on and say, right, I can get you this. And it's probably a trap I fall into a lot because I don't get to a client gig and say, okay, we're going to have some fun over this project and here's how I'm going to walk away from it. I don't think that upfront and I think I probably need to do more of that.

Dan Korus: Well, I think it's a really hard part because leadership is fun because it's fun to be needed and it feels good as a human to be needed, and it feels good for someone to walk into our office and say, hey, can you help me with this problem? And it feels better to fix that problem and for them to recognize that you fixed that problem. So I think we have this human desire to be needed, and the philosophical height of leadership not being needed is at odds with that human need to be wanted and needed, and to feel like we fit in. And so we're almost saying, okay, we're gonna, our goal is to start this project and to get people down a path, but at the end of it, you're right, we're, it's planned obsolescence on our own part, and that's a hard thing to swallow. But it allows for your team to take credit and I think that's a beautiful thing and that's a sustainable thing.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, it is. I've always, in fact, I was just commenting on a post on LinkedIn about the importance of a high performing team. I've always said, your own success as a leader is directly predicated upon the success of your team. They can either make you look good or not. Actually, when I was at Blessing White, I had a line manager who was based over in New Jersey, and he was a Brit, so I could make fun of him. And I said to him one day, Stephen, what do you want from me? And he said, Andrew, just make me look good. Which was easy because he was brilliant. He was really, really good at his job. So making him look good wasn't a hard feat. But just that one phrase and that one piece of thinking from Stephen has stayed with me for, well, 20 years now.

Andrew Walbridge: Make me look good.

Dan Korus: Yeah, and I think good leaders are able to make their teams look good too. It goes both ways. If you like your mentor, you're able to make them look good and that's always a great way to survive in modern corporate America. But if you're a good selfless leader, you also make your team look really good, and you're able to highlight their strengths and advocate for them within a corporation. So you had this stint at Warner Brothers, and then you said you went on to the next company, and is that where you met your mentor?

[14:00] What a toxic culture actually looks like

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah. No, I went to a US retailer called Claire's Accessories. You're probably aware of it, that one retail store. We as guys, we stand outside. We're not going in there. Dreadful experience. The culture at Claire's Accessories was dreadful. I was the European HR director, but I just didn't get on with the culture in any way, shape or form.

Dan Korus: What about the culture there was obtuse for you?

Andrew Walbridge: I think the US culture was fine. They had a head office just outside of Chicago and I went over there a couple of times. The people were great, the owners were great, it was still family run at that time. But it was the UK business that was the problem. Because whilst they had some values written on the wall, they were nothing like the lived values. Essentially the CEO of the UK and European business was a dictator and he led by fear. Well, he didn't lead, he managed by fear. And I'm not one for getting fearful of people, but it just didn't feel comfortable. There were lies told. We were going over to the States, and as directors of the European business we wouldn't fly on the same plane. We weren't that important, but they said, no, you can't fly on the same plane. And I was like, get over yourself. We met up in Chicago and we all piled into a town car to take us downtown. And this one CEO, I won't mention his name for obvious reasons, said, okay, this is what we can tell them. This is what we can't tell them. And that just didn't square with me.

Dan Korus: Yeah, 'cause you're one company, you're trying to become one team, and trust is about transparency. So what were some of the, well, we don't have to dwell on that too much, but I am just a little curious because I think for people who might be in this situation but can't label it themselves, what does the palette look like of a person who leads with fear? What were some of the things that they were doing that rubbed you the wrong way, aside from wanting to control the flow of information?

Andrew Walbridge: Huge. I think the thing that probably frustrated me most was the lack of the ability of people to listen. I've often said, when people say, give me one trait of a leader, I say listening, automatically it comes out. Because they employed me as an HR director because I was supposed to know something about HR. And if you're not willing to listen to me and my advice and my experience, then don't ask me the fucking question. Literally, don't ask me the question unless you're prepared to listen to the answer and take note of it, not just give it airtime. So listening was frustrating. You mentioned trust. You do need high levels of trust in a leadership team. And Lencioni I think hits it right on the nail when he talks about trust in teams, that trust is founded in vulnerability. Knowing the fact that I'm not perfect. I'm not bad, but I'm not perfect. I'm the nicest guy I know, it's my biggest strength. But knowing that Andrew doesn't do detail, Andrew doesn't like writing reports, Andrew doesn't like doing admin. All of those things, my team would always know that I hated it. I made the world's worst manager as a manager. But he's a pretty good leader. So I think those two, trust and the ability for people to listen, are probably the two biggest ones.

[21:00] The difference between management and leadership

Dan Korus: Yeah. And I wanna dig more into something you just said. You said you were the world's worst manager, but a pretty good leader. Tell us about what you think the difference is. Because we see this in trainings a lot. We see people discussing the difference between management and leadership. Management is usually focused on the day-to-day results, and leadership is often focused on the intangibles, something more profound. And I always think it's a silly question because I think it's hard to have one without the other. So from me sitting here, I just want to say, okay, Andrew's being humble. You can't have really good leadership without having some good management skills, and knowing your weaknesses and what you need to delegate is part of that. So in your own words and in your own experience, what do you think?

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, you're right. So I ran a pub and it was a pretty big pub. It had 65 employees. Grand Metropolitan was the owner of the pub and it was one of the first Grand Met pubs to turn over a million pound. This was a time when a pint of beer was less than a pound and a three course meal was under a fiver. So we did some volume through that pub. My management, if you think about management as being controlling, measuring, I wasn't measuring a thing. I could tell you how many covers we'd done. Hey, we'd done three and a half thousand covers this week. And I could tell you how much money we'd made. But was I controlling it? Not really. Was I controlling the teams? No. But if somebody stepped out of line, then a couple of people I had to let go, which was so difficult. But generally, if you think about leadership as being providing the direction, and not in the grand vision way, oh, we're going to put a man on the moon and bring him home safely, something much smaller. My vision for the pub, the Vic, was just to be somewhere where everybody came. And they came in their droves. I didn't make them come, my team made them come. Whether it was the people in the bar staff, people in the kitchen, people in the restaurant, they made the Vic what the Vic was. But I would paint a picture for them about what I wanna see. I remember we were doing a New Year's Eve gala dinner, and people would pay reasonable amounts of money to come and have dinner at the Vic. I had this vision of a buffet, a smorgasbord where people would go along and help themselves. I had to paint a picture for the chef to say that's exactly what I want, and he knocked it out the park. Absolutely knocked it out the park. But I didn't tell him what the menu was. I didn't tell him what margin he was gonna get. I didn't tell him anything. I just painted a picture for him about this is what I'm trying to achieve. Sadly, he was one of the ones I had to let go. But that's another story. So yeah, I kind of created an environment or a playing field where people could go to work and have fun. And I'm 100% sure that the people on my team had fun at work. We would have a laugh. I never took myself too seriously, as you're probably starting to recognise, and I was exactly the same in the Vic. Whether it was with staff or whether it was with customers, Andrew was just there having a laugh. Having a drink, having a chat. If I needed to do some work, I'd get behind the bar because it was busy, or if I needed to step in the kitchen because the kitchen was a bit of a war zone, I'd go in and do it. I'd put my big white hat on, go in the kitchen, go and sort things out. But for the most part, they didn't need me. I just painted the pictures to say, hey, let's have some fun. Let's enjoy this. Everybody enjoyed it. I had very, very little staff turnover, apart from the ones I fired, obviously. But very little staff turnover because people loved going to work. And that was my leadership. But from a control point of view, no, I was dreadful.

Dan Korus: That's outstanding. Well, I think we have this expectation of particularly technical leaders that total understanding and total control is required for good leadership. And that if you don't fully understand everything that's going on and if you don't know everything your team knows, you're somehow failing, and that you need to be able to answer every question. And I think you and I, it sounds like we both reject that, and I reject that wholeheartedly, because I think...

Andrew Walbridge: Absolutely, 100%.

Dan Korus: You are hiring technical experts who care about the technical details. Why would you force yourself to understand what they understand when they can go understand it? That's the beauty of assembling a team and of having importance. And I think when we force ourselves to take someone's work or maybe someone's slides and then we as a manager or leader go present that on their behalf, it robs that person of the chance to feel important and to be valued and to display their expertise and their technical knowledge to a greater audience.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Korus: I think it's a fallacy that leadership and management demands of us to be perfect at everything our team can do. I guess that sounds silly to say out loud. But we all believe it, I think.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah. Was it Steve Jobs that said, we don't employ people to tell them what to do, we employ people who come and tell us what to do, because they're the experts. They know their stuff. And the number of times...

Dan Korus: Right.

Andrew Walbridge: One of my probably most used phrases in the workplace is, I don't know. And people will come and ask me questions. Andrew, what do you think we should do? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I think we should do this. Okay, do you think that'll work? And so I kind of explore their thinking before I actually formulate a decision on my own. Because generally, I don't put any thought into the minutiae or the detail of a problem. I need, I'm a little bit slower. You have to kind of forgive me. I'm getting older and people come to me with a problem and I literally just say, I don't know, what are you thinking? And whilst they're telling me what they're thinking, I am listening to them, but I'm also formulating my own thoughts. So I might be able to say, have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing that? And they say, that's a good idea. Yeah, I know, I just made it up. So. You definitely don't need to know everything. Anybody who claims that they know everything is kidding themselves and kidding everybody else. Nobody knows everything, nor should you. I think what I love about coaching is that you can coach anybody to do anything. You don't need to be a subject matter expert, maybe a little bit of knowledge around the scope of the thing, but you don't need to be the expert at all. You just got to be great at asking questions. And I think the same applies to leaders and leadership. You just got to be good at using the resources you employed.

[29:00] How to stop giving your team the answers

Dan Korus: And I wanna talk about that just a little bit more before I try and ask you some questions about your mentor, because I think that many leaders get stuck in the trap of wondering why their team can't do things without them. We talked a little bit a couple minutes ago about, well, the highest form of leadership is not being needed, and that's what your goal is. That's the end goal, is to not be needed and to build a team that can produce high performance results without you. And not a lot of people understand that the way to do that is to back off and to not provide the answers. We think selfishly that if we share our thinking and if we overexplain everything, then the team will somehow be able to absorb all that information, and that's how we become not needed and obsolete ourselves. However, I think what you just touched on is the answer and what a lot of people don't understand. In order to build the critical thinking in your team, you have to force them to think by admitting either that you don't have the answer or being able to guide them and coach them towards finding their own. And you can influence that thinking process and that strategy. But when someone comes and asks you the question, the best thing to do is just say, well, what do you think? And that forces them to think of an answer. Then supporting them through the execution of their personal solution that they came up with is in fact the best way that we can develop that critical thinking muscle. 'Cause they came up with an idea. It's probably gonna work. Sometimes it won't, but they'll learn a valuable lesson. As leaders and managers we have access to support and resources, and so when they come up with an idea, we can back them with those support and resources. Hopefully we have some ideas of a couple traps or some pitfalls that they can avoid, and so we can help guide their thinking to keep them a little bit safer. But I think that's what building critical thinking's all about. And for managers out there who are complaining or wondering, man, my team needs me for everything, well, stop giving them everything.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, exactly. I think it was David Marquet in his book, Turn the Ship Around, that talked about creating an environment for thinking. Obviously, nuclear submarines are slightly different from working in pubs and cinemas. But he talked about... Actually, I'm going to make another point, and this is a bit of an Americanism. When you were doing your SATs, whatever age you were, probably in your teens, when you were doing math, you would probably get two marks per question. One for getting the answer right and one for showing how you worked it out. If you constantly give people the answer, do this, do this, this and this, then you just become the answer man and you can never go home and eat dinner. But if you show your own math, the way it kind of plays out is, hey Andrew, we've got a problem. Okay, what's the problem? Well, this is doing this. Okay, what should it be doing? Well, it should be doing that. Okay, so what options have you got to stop it doing this and start it doing that? Well, we could do X, we could do A, we could do B, we could do C. Which of those do you think is better? I think we should do C. Okay, go and do it. I haven't given them one answer, but all I've done is exactly the same as going through your SATs is just show my own thought processes. We've got a problem, it's doing this, should be doing that. Okay, how do we bridge it? And the more you do that, the less you have to come up with the answers and people start thinking for themselves. So I think David Marquet got that right, pains me to admit it, but yeah, he got that right. And I think...

Andrew Walbridge: It's kind of been my philosophy for a long time, probably not caused by any great academic thinking, but probably caused by the fact that I didn't know anything in most of the jobs I was doing. They'd come to me and say, I don't know what to do. But then I would adopt some critical thinking and help them think through it, because I really didn't know. Yeah, kind of fumbled my way through it. But then you find out that when you recruit the right people, they can think just as well as you, and they in a lot of cases have better answers and better ideas than you. Make the most of them.

[34:00] Meeting Terry Pearce, mentorship, and loss

Dan Korus: Yeah. Yeah, use the professionals around you. So, Andrew, it sounds like the mentor that you had after these experiences and the person who you were working with towards the crescendo of your career was someone who was really important to you and someone you learned a lot about. So tell us how did you meet this person? What did they mean to you? What did you learn from them? Tell us that story.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah. So Terry Pearce. He was born in or around San Francisco and he lived on the north coast of San Francisco Bay. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, the Haas Business School, and he was over in the UK to do some work for our nationalised telephony company, British Telecom. He'd been known by Blessing White for some time and we'd adopted a lot of his thinking from two books that he wrote. One was Leading Out Loud and one was another book called Clicks and Mortar. He was over doing some work and he said, who can I go and have dinner with because I don't know anybody in London? So Andrew, take this man to dinner. So [my wife] and I went to dinner with a couple of other folk and we just chatted and we just hit it off immediately. The next thing is I get a call from one of the sales team based out of Washington DC, to say can you come and do some work with Capital One Bank, they need a table coach. And so we would run Terry's Leading Out Loud with 30 odd people. Him at the front of the room, somebody supporting him at the front of the room and six table coaches, and I became the table coach. The only reason they wanted me there was they had some British people on the program and they didn't want them to feel alone, so I was kind of the token Brit coming over. That went well. Then the lady who was supporting Terry at the time left the company, went freelance, and I said to my boss, I'd really like to be Terry's right hand man. The person to stand at the front of the room and support Terry. And he said, yeah, do it. So we would do the Capital One gig twice a year for four years. Terry, because he wrote the book, it was his book, it was his thinking. And I was kind of the glamorous assistant, if you like. We ran that for a few years. So Terry and I became really close. I would fly into DC on the Saturday. On the Sunday we would go, actually it was quite funny, on one Sunday he said, we met for breakfast and he said, right, come on, we're off to the gym. What? Gym? Terry was in his mid 70s at that point, but he'd take me to the gym and I'd be like a Belisha Beacon. I'd just be bright red out of breath and he'd be fit as a fiddle. Until he wasn't. And so we became very close, and then when I left Blessing White, he said, listen, I'm doing the third edition of my book Leading Out Loud, and I'm gonna spend some time at University of California with some old colleagues to really learn about the neurobiology that underpins inspiration. And I was like, okay, that sounds cool. He said, listen, get on a flight, come over to San Francisco, get yourself some accommodation, I've got no room in the house, and we'll go to University of California. So I kind of went to University of California hanging onto his shirt tails, onto his coat tails, so I could just learn everything that he was learning. It was great. We learned from some real experts in neurobiology, we learned from some experts in psychology, and yeah, it was great fun. And we went to dinner a few times and had a few to drink as well, back in the days when I was a drinker.

Dan Korus: Yeah. It sounds like Terry was a mentor, a friend, someone you looked up to and also someone who was by your side.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, he was more than just a mentor. He was definitely a friend. You probably don't know this, I lost my dad when I was 22. So that's ages ago. Terry kind of replaced that relationship for me. He didn't try to father me, but I just kind of looked up to him in the way that you'd look up to your father. So when he did pass in 2019, it was a big loss. Big loss.

Dan Korus: Yeah. I'm sorry for your loss, and I'm sure that Terry would be glad to know that you're still in the field and you're still working on these things and you're still chasing the passion.

Andrew Walbridge: It's okay. He said something to me the last dinner we had together. We didn't know it was going to be the last dinner, but we were sat down having dinner and it was the Ritz Carlton in McLean, Virginia. He said, I'm not getting any younger. I know that, me neither. And he said, I need somebody to take over the business from me. He didn't mention me, I didn't feel it was right to say, oh, I'll do it, I'll do it. And so I didn't say a thing, which is a shame because then suddenly he passed and I'd have loved to pick up his work where he left it. Which is kind of where Leaders Labyrinth came from. It's a bit of a recognition of Terry, really. Terry and my parents. So yeah, he was a good guy. One of the good ones. He was quite funny too.

[41:00] Leaders Labyrinth and finding your voice

Dan Korus: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you being open enough to tell us about Terry, and I think it is a really good segue into talking about the Leaders Labyrinth and your work with all of this because this is something that is a culmination piece of your career. Why don't you tell us about Leaders Labyrinth and what you're doing with it, what it means to you.

Andrew Walbridge: Yeah, before I get into that, you've used a couple of words, culmination of my career and the crescendo of my career. I'm still going. I'm not going anywhere. I have no plans to retire. Yeah, there's a lot more in me yet. I've got yet another birthday next week. That's very depressing. So yeah, Leaders Labyrinth. I always knew somehow that there was a book in me. I'd learned all of this stuff.

Dan Korus: I didn't say the crescendo was over, Andrew.

Andrew Walbridge: I did a lot of work on me, self-awareness, what happened to me to create, what are my values, what happened to me to make those values important. I just did a load of work on me. So I had all these stories to tell and I kind of thought, you know what, I need to turn it into a book. But I could not write an academic book for all the tea in China. I just don't know enough words, or clever words or smart words. So I thought, I just need to write it as a story, as a fable. And I remember reading fables by Ken Blanchard, the One Minute Manager, Gung Ho, Raving Fans, and I remember how those stories resonated with me, and I kind of thought, you know what, yeah, I could write a story. I started this book so many times and then hit a wall and kind of said, yeah, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. I'd talk to colleagues and say, I was thinking about this idea and they'd say, that's a bad idea because X, Y, Z. So yeah, I had about 17 false starts and then finally got over the start line with what I say, what I have now, which is a story about Ethan and Wally. Ethan runs this restaurant chain based out of Seattle. I ended up writing the book and I was really chuffed with it. It's out there, it's available, quick plug, available in Barnes and Noble, Amazon, wherever you like. But then I had another read of it and it's not a big book, it's not a big book at all. Because it's missing out all the stuff I learned through University of California or my own research. And I kind of thought, okay, I need to do another book to explain where the book came from. And it was all that psychology and that neurobiology. So I wrote another book called The Anatomy of Felt Leadership, because good leadership is felt by its followers. When you've got a great leader, you'll feel that they're great. So I wrote that again. It's a very short book. If you're flying from Seattle to San Francisco, you'll have finished it halfway there. Yeah, they're kind of my legacy a little bit, because long after I've gone, they'll still be available. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, don't forget. I really, really, really enjoyed the process of writing them. I got a big kick out of that because I was storytelling. So the process was...

Dan Korus: What about the process?

Andrew Walbridge: Loosely based upon a workshop. I wrote a workshop called Leaders Labyrinth. Before I wrote the book, I kind of thought, yeah, I need a workshop that's mine. And this is how I would structure the workshop. So the book is loosely based on the workshop. You have to start off with two big questions. Who are you and what do you want? And that's where the book kind of starts. It was intended to start. I've broken a few of my own rules on the way. Then once you've started, you've gone through that piece of self-awareness and you can answer the question, who are you and what do you want? Which are two very difficult questions to answer. Then you need to find your voice. And on the workshop, we run this experience, which is very telling, very revealing and very difficult. Wally puts Ethan into a situation where he's incredibly uncomfortable so that he could find his voice. And the story unfolds from there, really. Finding your voice, I have found, is one of the biggest changes people can make in their own leadership advocacy. Because once you've found your voice, you can become quite candid. You can say what it is you want to say without worrying about empathy and caring and compassion and all of those things. You just can say it. But finding your voice can take years. For Andrew, it took me years. I was the painfully shy boy at school. Painfully shy. Hated school. I chose my school not because it was good academically, but my brothers had gone there so I'd feel safe. Not that they would ever look after me, bastards. It took me a long, long time to even talk to a customer. When I got my first job behind the bar, I didn't even want to look at a customer, let alone talk to them. But very quickly I found my voice, and when it came to my kitchen career, I had a job of, we call it a chef de rang, who's the guy that cooks your dinner at your table and sets fire to it. All that theater about flambé and all of those things. I was doing that. I couldn't believe I was doing that. So yeah, it took me a long time to find my voice, but the process on the workshop is quite uncomfortable. But I'd encourage anybody to come and do it because it really sorts out the men from the boys. I don't mean that in a sexist way. So that was the process really. And the hardest part was coming up with a narrative, a situation.

Dan Korus: No. Yeah.

Andrew Walbridge: Is it a chain of restaurants? Is it a telephony company? Is it a software company? It took me ages to do that, just so I could join the dots and take the readers on a journey so that they knew where the journey was going. That was the hard, I suppose we call it creativity. The creativity was the hard bit.

Dan Korus: Well, I think when you have something that means so much to you, and it's obvious that both of these books do, it can be hard to do it right the first time and do it justice. Done is better than perfect a lot of times, and sometimes you need perfect, and perfect means different things to different people. But steps forward is good. That's perfect. I want to end there. Thank you so much, Andrew. Thank you for your time. Thank you for coming on the Kestryl Edge podcast.

Dan Korus: Hey everyone, after recording the episode I found that I didn't plug any of Andrew's things, and they are fantastic, and you should go check them out. A good place to start would be Substack, so that's at Andrew Walbridge on Substack. There's gonna be a link in the description. Andrew's also on LinkedIn and posts some articles there as well. And a place where you can find one of his free lessons is on Maven. It's called Have You Earned the Right to Lead Today? And what you'll learn if you go do the Maven free lesson is you'll understand how trust is formed and lost in leadership. You'll be able to spot where credibility may be weaker than you think. You'll use three levers to build trust quickly and consistently. And you'll be able to take one action to strengthen trust today. So Andrew's content is great. Andrew's been doing this for over 30 years. He has a lot of very sharp ideas. And so if you want to cut through the noise of a lot of the leadership coaching that's out there, I'd highly recommend going and checking out Andrew's material. You can get in touch with him, I think, through any of these platforms. LinkedIn might be the easiest. And I hope you all enjoyed this episode. If you did, give us a subscribe, a like. Share a comment below with some thoughts. Cheers.