Episode 198 – Eric Spencer

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Automated Transcription

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Eric Spencer  0:00  

I totally agree. It’s interesting in Cultivate, Morag’s first book Cultivate the Power of Winning Relationships. There are what we call The Four YESES. It’s a question that you have been asking yourself when you’ve been trying to figure out where a relationship was, even if you didn’t know you were asking yourself this question. And the first question is, can I count on you to show up and do what you’re supposed to do? Pretty reactive, pretty transactional. The second question is, can I depend on you? And that’s a little bit more proactive. Can I depend on you to go the extra mile to give me the courtesy heads up? When we go into that meeting or whatever. Still pretty transactional, where relationship magic starts to happen, is in the last two questions. And those questions are, do I care about you? And do I trust you? And do I care about you? Isn’t a group huggy kind of thing, it’s exactly what you said. It is, do I care enough to know your story to learn a little bit about who do you hang out with in this organization? What baseball team do you like? How many kids do you have? All of that backstory context, do I care enough to even ask those questions? Because if I do, that’s when the relationship starts to transform to your point. We keep the story that way we figure out, is this person an acquaintance or a best friend or somewhere in between? And it’s all about the connection level around those stories for sure.

 

Richard Matthews  1:31  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

 

Richard Matthews  2:26  

Hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having on the line Eric Spencer. Eric, are you there?

 

Eric Spencer  2:32  

I’m here 

 

Richard Matthews  2:33  

Awesome, glad to have you here and we were talking about just before we got on the call you’re in Colorado is that right? 

 

Eric Spencer  2:40  

I am in Colorado.

 

Richard Matthews  2:42  

Yeah, enjoying the cold winter there. My family and I for those of you who have been following along with our podcast and our travels, we are in Central California right outside of Yosemite Valley. We’re literally 15 minutes from here to the entrance of Yosemite which is kind of cool. And we’re freezing our tails off up here but this is where my family moves so I have to come visit them during the holiday’s whatnot.

 

Eric Spencer  3:04  

You guys are RVing if I heard correctly, right?

 

Richard Matthews  3:07  

Yeah, that is correct, here, look and for people are on the video. If I zoom this out a bit, you can actually see the closet in the RV and the bathroom over there. A little fancy studio I’ve built into my rig here.

 

Eric Spencer  3:20  

I love it. 

 

Richard Matthews  3:21  

Yeah. So what I want to do before we get too far into the interview is just do a brief introduction for you. And then we’ll dive into your story. So Eric Spencer works with SkyeTeam. Is that the correct name for the company? 

 

Eric Spencer  3:33  

That’s right, SkyeTeam. 

 

Richard Matthews  3:35  

Yeah, and your passion is for designing and facilitating executive leadership and development programs that transformed careers and leadership reputations as the COO, which for those who don’t know, is chief operating officers. Is that right? 

 

Eric Spencer  3:48  

That’s correct. 

 

Richard Matthews  3:49  

Yeah, for SkyeTeam, he brings more than 20 years of experience building and shaping Human Resources organizations. So what I want you to do for me at the beginning here is tell me what it is that SkyeTeam is known for, and then maybe personally, what you’re known for, what it is you do for the marketplace, and how you serve them? 

 

Eric Spencer  4:05  

Yeah, for sure. So SkyeTeam is a boutique leadership development, team development, and executive coaching firm, based here in beautiful Colorado. Our catch, our angle, the thing that we bring to the party in the leadership development space, is to focus on the quality and depth of the relationships that people have at work. So that’s what we focus on when we’re working on an intact team development project or a larger Leadership Development Program. We predicate everything on the idea that the quality and depth of the relationships you have at work are the single biggest influencer of your happiness, engagement, and productivity. And we do that in several different ways. We do that working with leadership teams working with in-tech teams down the management stack, developing programs for frontline managers or managers of managers, which I think is sort of the hardest turn in the leadership pipeline. That’s the focus that we bring. That’s the way we separate ourselves from the pack. It’s all about relationships span, relationships matter.

 

Richard Matthews  5:11  

So here’s my timely question for you on that. How has everything moving to virtual teams impacted the work that you do with organizations over the last couple of years?

 

Eric Spencer  5:23  

Oh, my gosh, it’s changed everything. Back in 2019, I was on an airplane every Monday, going somewhere and coming home every Friday, and we’ve switched everything to a virtual delivery, like everybody had to. And some of the things that we’ve learned in that process are, there are things we can do here digitally, that is actually better than we did in the old days, when we would finish a really powerful session and the artifacts, or a bunch of flip charts around the room that you had to take pictures of, and then transcribe into a report. And we’ve also learned that the normal development of a team, the dynamics that took place in real space, are taking two and three times as long, so things are just slower. Relationships are harder to build, because we’re missing all of the context, the ad hoc conversations, I don’t bump into you, Richard at the coffee machine, or walk with you to a meeting, not nearly to the degree that we did back in the old days. And that’s changed the dynamic of how relationships deepen, and the time it takes to get there.

 

Richard Matthews  6:32  

Yeah, and then probably also the methodologies you use to actually facilitate relationships outside of the actual work discussions that are happening.

 

Eric Spencer  6:40  

100%, we’ve had to tweak a lot of things, largely with respect to intentionality, a lot of the things that would just happen as a natural course, they just don’t happen in the digital spaces naturally. So we have to be much more intentional, we find ourselves making a whole lot more choices about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to show up in those spaces.

 

Richard Matthews  7:03  

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what I want to find out before we get too much into how it is you do, what you do is find out how you got here. We talk on this show all the time about your origin story. And every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today and we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into leadership development training? Or did you start in a job and eventually move over to start working as an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from? How’d you get here?

 

Eric Spencer  7:32  

Yeah, well, I’m a kid of the 80s, I started my teenage life with a dream. I wanted to be a musician in a metal band, I wanted to have a really long hair.

 

Richard Matthews  7:46  

You have a guitar over your shoulder there.

 

Eric Spencer  7:48  

So that’s what I did. At the beginning of my life. I was a musician, I played in bands, lived on the road, did it for a living for a while after college. Best experience of my life. Yes. Worst experience in my life, also, yes. It was a fantastic journey. I lived in a van with five guys. It was a rough go for a few years. But we had a good time. And I got to cross a lot of things off of that bucket list. But getting into this space, I always wanted to do this, it was what my focus was in grad school. But when I came out of school, I came out of school twice in a recession, which is awesome. Trying to figure out how to break into this space was hard. So I didn’t, I took the first job that I could get. And I spent the beginning of my career working in operations, largely doing mergers and acquisition work, which was fascinating. But it took me a while to figure out how to get into the space where I could work in a leadership development capacity. So I took a job in HR and spent 15, 20 years banging around HR departments, because leadership development internally tends to live, if not inside of HR, at least adjacent to it. So that’s how I got close to that space, was able to cut my teeth designing programs that inside of organizations, university concepts, I got to spread my wings there and figure out how you can do this in an impactful and effective way.

 

Richard Matthews  9:41  

And then how did you transition from there working in HR to being the CEO of SkyeTeam.

 

Eric Spencer  9:46  

So COO, CEO will get mad at you.

 

Richard Matthews  9:49  

COO, did I mess it up? I meant COO, I was thinking COO.

 

Eric Spencer  9:55  

So it was interesting, and it’s a relationship story. So I had done a couple of startups, and startups are startups and they’re either the ones where all your stock options, cash in and you buy yourself your private island and live happily ever after. Or it works out not so lucratively. And the last startup that I was a part of went that way. And I was planning my next move, looking for my next thing, when I had a couple of offers on the table, I had an offer to go take an HR job and do that thing again. And I wasn’t really excited about that. And then I had an opportunity to join a consulting firm, building a leadership development practice inside of that, and I thought, okay, so I wrote a business plan to do that. And I thought I need to sanity check this with somebody who’s actually doing this work right now in the space. So I had known 

Morag Barrett, my business partner here at SkyeTeam, I had known her from a company that we both worked at in the past. And she had since left and I had long since left, and I thought, she’s doing this work. She looks like she’s reasonably successful. She’s been doing it for a few years. Maybe I’ll just see if she’ll look at my plan. And so I randomly pinged her. And we met up for coffee, and I walked her through my business plan. And a famous line from that meeting, she said, well, you can put anything you want to plan, and it’s all wishes, ponies, and unicorns, till the money’s in the bank. And we laughed about that. And then she got this sort of thoughtful look on her face. And she said, so you’re going to pick one of these things, these opportunities, I said, yeah. And she goes, why don’t we do it together? And I didn’t see that coming. And it was an interesting thing, because had I not taken a shot on a relationship that I didn’t really even have, at that point in time, I wouldn’t be doing what we call the best job in the world, my favorite thing I’ve ever done, I get to do really impactful work with really cool clients with people that I love to work with. So it was a great thing.

 

Richard Matthews  12:08  

Yeah, that’s awesome. I was just discussing with one of my best friends the other day, how impactful relationships are, in terms of growing your business to doing what you want to do. And I’ve noticed just over the course of my entrepreneurial career, that all of the biggest strides that have happened in my business are a result of some relationship that I’ve built or developed. And it’s funny because you can’t just do that, you have to actually like, I was comparing it to you drive a car, you have to put the gas in the car, and you have to actually drive the steering wheel and push on the gas pedal every day to make the business go around. But it’s the relationships and the stuff that comes out of those. It’s like having that nitro boost button that you can use every once in a while to really rock it forward.

 

Eric Spencer  12:49  

100%. And it’s interesting. It’s one of those things, we’ll be talking with technical clients. And they’ll say we don’t have time for that soft, fluffy people stuff. And you can have the best idea in the world, the best widget, the best product, the best process. But if you don’t get the people’s stuff right, it’s not going to go where it could go. And the people’s stuff is all predicated on those relationships.

 

Richard Matthews  13:16  

Absolutely. And it’s always where the biggest winds come from, at least in my experience.

 

Eric Spencer  13:23  

Yeah. 100%.

 

Richard Matthews  13:27  

So what I want to talk about then, is over the course of your career, have you developed any superpowers. Every iconic hero has a superpower whether it’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius, intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius in the real world, which is either a skill or set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over the course of time to really set you apart, that lets you help your clients slay their villains and come on top in their journeys. The way I like to frame it is if you look at all the things that you’ve developed over your life, all the skills, you probably have a common thread that ties all those things together. And a common thread is probably where you find your superpower. So with that framing what do you think your superpower is?

 

Eric Spencer  14:08  

Yeah, I think the thing that differentiates me in this very crowded space in which I work is a couple of things. One, it’s relatability, it’s the ability to connect with someone in a relatively meaningful way in a short amount of time. And that’s largely driven by a couple of skills, one of those skills is listening, you have to listen. I am more interested in learning about you than I am talking about me, which is an interesting paradigm for a guest on the show. Because I want to start asking you questions. That’s why I asked about the RV thing. I’m like, did I hear that right? And I think that’s the thing that’s a little bit different. A lot of folks do what we do. They have their sort of cookie cutter programs that they replicate and they just rebrand for different clients. We start all of our engagements with what we call a discovery phase. We come in and we interview a percentage of the employee population from the C suite down to the individual contributor level. And we ask them questions about what’s working, and what could be better or different inside that organization. And we learned a ton. And a lot of times those presenting symptoms that the initial phone call, the executive brought to the table aren’t the real issue. The real issue is something completely different. And we get there by listening. And I think that’s the thing that makes SkyeTeam different and it’s who I am as a person, I love connecting with people and trying to figure out okay, what is really going on here? And how can we help? If we can.

 

Richard Matthews  15:48  

Yeah, you’ll probably appreciate this, because it’s one of the things that comes up a lot on this show, because I think it’s central to life. But it’s my philosophy on how relationships work and has to do with listening as a superpower. But I’ve always said that human beings are story born people, and we judge the depth of our relationship on how much of the other person’s story that we know. So if someone who you know their name, but you don’t really know much of their story, we call those people acquaintances, and someone that you know their name, and you know a lot of their story, you might call them a friend, and then someone who you know, so much of their story that you’ve heard all their stories before, the only way to deepen your relationship with them is to go out and create new stories together, we call those best friends. And that’s how we measure relationships is by the depth of the other person’s story. And so the way I run this podcast from the way I look at relationship building, is about learning how to do both sides of that, to listen to someone’s story, and also learn how to tell your own story so that you guys can have a deeper relationship together.

 

Eric Spencer  16:58  

I totally agree. It’s interesting in Cultivate, Morag’s first book, Cultivate the Power of Winning Relationships. There are what we call The Four Yeses, it’s the questions that you’ve been asking yourself when you’ve been trying to figure out where a relationship was, even if you didn’t know you were asking yourself these questions. And the first question is, can I count on you to show up and do what you’re supposed to do? Pretty reactive, pretty transactional. The second question is, can I depend on you? And that’s a little bit more proactive. Can I depend on you to go the extra mile to give me the courtesy heads up when we go into that meeting or whatever? Still pretty transactional. Where relationship magic starts to happen is in the last two questions and those questions are? Do I care about you? And do I trust you? And do I care about you isn’t a group huggy kind of thing? It’s exactly what you said. It is, do I care enough to know your story to learn a little bit about you? Who do you hang out with in this organization? What baseball team do you like? How many kids do you have? All of that backstory context, do I care enough to even ask those questions? Because if I do, that’s when the relationship starts to transform to your point. We keep score that way, we figure out, is this person an acquaintance? Or are they a best friend or somewhere in between? And it’s all about the connection level around those stories for sure.

 

Richard Matthews  18:28  

And it’s interesting, to our superhero theme, the best villains are always the ones who have the best stories. And it’s interesting because they say the more you know a person’s story, the less you can hate them.

 

Eric Spencer  18:45  

Oh, so true. 

 

Richard Matthews  18:48  

Yeah. And not to get like two. I don’t know if the word would be rated R but they say if you are ever being held up at gunpoint, one of the things that will save your life more than anything else is to start telling the person your story. Because it humanizes the other person. And the more of your story that someone knows, the less they can hate you. And we’re wired that way, the more of someone’s story you know, the more you like them, and you can’t help it. It’s not something that you can change if you know that person’s story. I call it relationship hacking. If you want to build a closer relationship with anyone the only thing you have to do other than continue to be a good person is actually learn their story and care about it.

 

Eric Spencer  19:43  

It seems so easy.

 

Richard Matthews  19:46  

It does.

 

Eric Spencer  19:49  

You know, Richard, it’s funny you think about the state of the world today and where things are and people complain that oh, it’s not like the good old days I struggle with when the good old days were anyway. But that concept, that notion is so simple yet, like we were talking about in the beginning, the digital distance makes getting to those opportunities to learn the stories even a little bit harder.

 

Richard Matthews  20:18  

Yeah. And one of the things that fascinates me about traveling is because we spend a short amount of time with the people that were around before we move on to someplace else where they move on to someplace else. It has made the art of learning how to build a relationship fast, something that just by necessity you had to get really good at.

 

Eric Spencer  20:43  

So what’s your hack? What’s your number one tip for doing relationship building in that small space very quickly?

 

Richard Matthews  20:52  

So this is very practical for the way that we run our life. But the principle I think applies, it’s when you meet someone that you want to have a further relationship with. You first say hi, now, because you may not have a chance to say hi, tomorrow. And the second one is to invite him to dinner, break bread together. We’ve got some of our best friends in the world are people that we have just walked up on in the park at a local place and said, hey, my name is so and so I see you also have kids like me, why don’t you come over for dinner, bring your kids we’ll make you a meal. And you spend that time essentially getting to know each other, sharing stories with each other and finding out, how did you get here? Why do you travel? What do your kids like? What do you like? That kind of thing. And it takes an evening around the fire and around a dinner table to build lifetime relationships. And I think one of the things that I like about the traveling lifestyle that was very difficult to do when we were not traveling, and I have to be more intentional about it when you’re not traveling, is you get yourself into a rut and you see the same people in the same places all the time. So you don’t have the opportunity to practice that beginning portion of a relationship as much as we’ve had the opportunity to do over the last several years. So it’s a muscle we flex a lot.

 

Eric Spencer  22:10  

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And it’s funny kids and pets, the great equalizers, that’s what makes conversation easy. In the work context, it’s different. And I think the sort of digitalization that we’ve gone through over the last couple of years, has been kind of a weird dichotomy. We’ve had the extra distance, we’ve been very task focused over scheduled, oversubscribed, but in these windows, now I see you in this little square. And prior to the pandemic, we used to protect this square. Well, if we were on a video call, chances are, we were on a video call like this, it was just audio on a video platform. But if we were on a video call back then we tried to protect this space and make it very much like work. And over the last couple of years, we’ve gone from, overdoing green screen backgrounds to seeing kids and pets jump into frame and partially clothed spouses go through the frame, we’ve seen intimately into people’s homes and lives in a way that we would have never done before. So it’s interesting that it’s been harder to connect with people, because of the lack of context and ad hoc conversation, but seeing into people’s real lives. In 2019, if I knew that you have four kids, 

 

Richard Matthews  23:43  

Yeah, four babies. 

 

Eric Spencer  23:44  

Yeah. So if I knew that you had four kids, I understood that, on an intellectual level. But if I have been on Zoom calls with you, or teams call with you over the pandemic, and I’ve actually seen your kids a whole different level of appreciation and experience for what’s going on in your world, to your point about learning your story, that’s seeing your story play out in real-time in a way that we didn’t see at work before.

 

Richard Matthews  24:09  

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had a badass naked two year old girl coming here and want to say hi to my podcast guests, because she thinks everyone on video calls is grandma and grandpa because that’s who she talks to most of the time so she wants to come to say hi to them and potty training so she’s not always wearing pants.

 

Eric Spencer  24:29  

Hey, you know what? We haven’t all been wearing pants over the last two years either. So there’s that.

 

Richard Matthews  24:38  

That is accurate. That’s one of the best parts about the pandemic is you don’t need to wear anything but a shirt.

 

Eric Spencer  24:44  

That’s right below shoulder level. It’s all up for grabs.

 

Richard Matthews  24:47  

It’s all free game. Nobody knows. You could be wearing pants. You could be naked, you could be wearing whatever you want, PJ’s on the waist down.

 

Eric Spencer  24:56  

I saw a photo the other day. It was a bunch of folks out work, they got together to wear what they used to wear on Zoom calls. So it was a jacket and tie, a very nice blouse and shorts and yoga pants and pajamas, it was hilarious.

 

Richard Matthews  25:14  

I wouldn’t be allowed at that meeting. I have a joke with my mastermind group, we call it the no pants pandemic. 

 

Eric Spencer  25:28  

Hey, love it. And whatever it takes Richard to get into your creative zone. You do you.

 

Richard Matthews  25:34  

Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. So I want to talk then about the flip side of your superpowers. So every superpower has a fatal flaw on the other side. So if your superpower is the act of listening to actually be able to hear someone’s story and see their person. The opposite side of that fatal flaw is, just like every Superman has his kryptonite, or wonder woman has her bracelets of victory she can’t remove without going mad, you probably have something that’s held you back, something you struggled with. For me, I struggled with a couple of things, I struggled with perfectionism for a long time, which kept me from shipping products, because I can always tweak it just a little bit more before I brought it to the market and got rejected. And I struggled with a lack of self-care, which really brought itself out in not having good boundaries with my clients and not having good boundaries with my time. And so I let my time and my clients walk all over me. But I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it? So you could continue to grow in your role and grow your company?

 

Eric Spencer  26:30  

Yeah, great question. And for me, I’m a depression and anxiety kid. I was diagnosed with depression when I was about 24 years old, and have wrestled with that in all of its different tentacles over the years. And the stigma associated with that makes it something that you don’t talk about at work. By saying those things out loud or admitting those things, you’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable position, that negative self talk turns that into a position of weakness, and so you don’t, and you end up finding yourself in situations that you shouldn’t be in, you find yourself trying to tough it out or grind through whatever it is that you’re going through and expect that it’s not going to impact how you show up, how you relate, how you connect, or how you perform, you’re insane. It’s impacting all of those things. And you may be really good at getting by, but when those things come to bear, people know, they can see it on you, they can smell it on you. And it shows up in very subtle and not so subtle ways. So one of the things that I’ve done to deal with that is I talk about it, I will speak about it, I post about it all the time, trying to shine the light on the fact that it’s a thing that we all deal with in some form or fashion. Some of us have it in a clinical respect, but there are emotions and situations that all human beings have to deal with. This notion that you could leave your personal self at home and only bring your work self to work is flawed. We’re human beings and we show up as our whole selves wherever we are. And that’s okay. I wrote an article in LinkedIn a little while ago called I’m not okay. And that’s okay, I think. And I think shining a light on that it’s been really powerful. I’ve had a lot of people reach out and connect with me to say, thank you for saying the things that I wish I could say, but I’m afraid if I say them, I’m gonna get fired. And I remember I was at a pretty low point in my life. I was here at SkyeTeam. And I was at a place where I needed to tell my business partners what was going on? Because I’m sure they were curious. What’s wrong? What’s going on with this guy? And I knew that if I said the words out loud, I ran the risk of them not trusting me not giving me projects that they thought I could handle, judging me in some way right at the imposter syndrome wave just kind of piles over you. And they were amazing, they were supportive. They were open hearted. And it changed the way that I deal with my fatal flaw in the work context.

 

Richard Matthews  29:40  

Yeah, depression is an interesting thing because it comes in everything from very minor, like a lot of entrepreneurs have dealt with the imposter syndrome, which is a type of depression I think, even if it’s not clinically related that way, what I know of depression, it’s a type of depression all the way up to like a clinical depression. I know it’s something my wife has struggled with. I’ve struggled with the imposter syndrome stuff earlier in my career. And I’ve had several friends that I’ve helped through some of their depression. And this may not be useful for you, but it’ll be less useful to someone listening somewhere. One of the most helpful things that I have found for the people I know who have struggled with depression, is helping them see how much they matter to the people in their world. And it’s an interesting discussion to have. Because, at least with the couple of people I’ve known who have struggled with depression, the thing that they are thinking to themselves, even if they’re not saying out loud is that they don’t matter. Which it’s a fallacy on its surface, but it’s hard to see. 

 

Eric Spencer  30:51  

Totally. 

 

Richard Matthews  30:52  

Yeah, it’s hard to see because like, in my wife’s case, for instance, I was like, she gets that thought that she doesn’t matter. And I’m like, but if you matter to me, then you can’t not matter. Because you matter to me. And I was like, and I’m not the only one, you got four kids in there. And my parents and your friends and all the people and like, you just have to get yourself over that hump of thinking, like, my story matters. And your person matters. And it’s interesting, because I was like, even if you were to leave tomorrow, every aspect of who you are, has impacted my story forever. And what’s interesting is even people that you just meet on the street, and you say hi to them and you shake hands, the moment that you’ve interacted with someone else, they become a part of your story forever. And you can’t take them out of your story, because that’s not the way this works. So the reality is, you matter, you matter to the people in your life, and you matter to the people around you. And, sadly, there’s nothing you can do about it. I say sadly, but really it’s happy. So you have to matter. And it’s a thing that you have to wrap your head around. I don’t know if that’s helpful for you. But that’s one of the things that I’ve found that’s really useful for helping people with depression.

 

Eric Spencer  32:25  

Yeah, it’s interesting. I love the way you framed it. It’s like mathematical proof. If you matter to me, you matter and that’s indefensible, you can’t change that, you can’t refute that.

 

Richard Matthews  32:37  

It’s a lightbulb moment for some people.

 

Eric Spencer  32:40  

What’s interesting about being on the other side of the table, inside the mind of the depressed, is that I don’t matter, it’s sort of level one. Level two is even worse, because level two isn’t just that I don’t matter, it’s that I am a burden to those around me. It’s, I don’t matter, and that’s bad. But now you have to deal with me? Wow, that’s extra heavy. And I don’t want to put that on somebody else. And so it’s unraveling it, I love getting to it at the I don’t matter level sort of level one. Before it gets to the I’m a burden to you as well. That’s powerful.

 

Richard Matthews  33:26  

And it’s such an interesting discussion to have with people. What we’ve been talking about the whole listening and the relationships and all that stuff, a lot of that comes down to the reason people get depressed, in the first place has to do with they don’t feel like other people have heard their story. That’s why they don’t think they matter. Or they don’t they don’t see that happening. And it’s not like I’m perfect at this. But I think learning how to use your superpower, listening is really an important aspect of helping people have a healthy life. Learning to listen to them helps them see that they matter to you. And that they’ve had an impact on your story.

 

Eric Spencer  34:19  

Yeah, it’s that interconnectedness. And it goes back to what you were talking about earlier about knowing the story, knowing their story, and knowing that they know your story, it’s a loop. And a lot of times we don’t we don’t close that loop intentionally. It’s just a byproduct of how humans interact, or we assume, it’s one of those relationship elements that we just take for granted. So I think calling attention to it in that way, especially in this frame that we were just talking about can be a super powerful thing.

 

Richard Matthews  34:55  

Absolutely. And on that subject, because I think depression can be an enemy, I want to talk about your common enemy in your business. Just like every superhero hero has their arch nemesis, a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes a lot of forms, but we want to put it in the context of your clients. And it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that you constantly have to fight against, when they sign on the dotted line, if you had your magic wand, you just bop them on the head and not have to deal with that. What would you say your common enemy is in your business?

 

Eric Spencer  35:33  

I think, with what we deal with, a lot of times and you think about when money gets tight when budgets get cut, two things get impacted, usually right off the bat, and that’s recruiting, and any sort of training and development work. And I think the common enemy in our space is the idea that leadership development, team development is extra, it’s nice to have, if we’ve got the time and the money. We argue that it’s a must have, but it’s a foundational element of getting to high performance of getting beyond just writing the momentum wave to wherever you’re going. It’s the idea that it’s optional. I mean, if you think about great athletes, I always think about Tiger Woods, or Michael Jordan, or these iconic athletes, they had coaches until they stopped playing. They always had a coach outside of what they were doing with their team, or in their professional context, they hired other people to bring into that space to help them get better at their craft, get better at what they do. Because they saw the value in it. And a lot of times I think in corporate America today, it’s one of those things that’s nice, it’s a treat to give to your team. It’s a good thing to have if we happen to have extra cash. And I would argue that it’s a foundational, fundamental element to becoming a high performing team to becoming a high performing individual, to being best in breed at whatever it is that you do.

 

Richard Matthews  37:14  

Yeah, it’s interesting, too, because I don’t think relationships are the only thing in that category. The leadership training, I think the other thing in that category is also health performance. And I think both of those two things really impact your people. If they’re healthy, and they know how to have good relationships, then they can actually show up and do good work.

 

Eric Spencer  37:36  

That’s right. And giving them the opportunity to skill build, connect, and relate changes the game. If you don’t do those things, people show up to work sick, they show up to work uninspired, they keep the chair warm until something better comes along. I am fortunate enough to do a thing that I love to do with people that I love to do it with. I don’t want to look for another job. There is no other job. There is this life that I choose to live right now. Because of all of the things that we talked about the culmination of all of those relationships, has put me in this position where, why would I do anything else? Clients ask all the time, you should come here and do this. I’m like, why would I do that? I don’t want to go to the same building every day. Oh, gross.

 

Richard Matthews  38:34  

So what’s interesting is, you mentioned it being a common enemy because people think it’s optional. One of the things I’ve noticed is because of what I do here on the show, I get to talk to CEOs of companies all over the place in lots of different spaces, how the pandemic has really brought all shining light on to the health aspect, and a lot more companies are no longer looking at the health of their employees as an optional thing. So they’re bringing stuff in, like health coaches and health training and things like that. And it’s interesting because health is semi measurable. You’ve got things you could measure, you could measure your weight like there’s things you can measure whether or not that makes a difference on how healthy you are is irrelevant. But it feels more measurable. And I’m curious how you guys deal with that because I know how CEOs and COOs and CFOs work, they want to see the ROI before they make decisions. How do you guys discuss ROI to relationships, and how does that impact the bottom line? And how do you actually make that discussion to show them that it’s not an optional thing?

 

Eric Spencer  39:43  

Yeah, I mean, I would say a few things about that. One, just on the health topic in general, employees are making that a conversation that executives can avoid anymore, that genie has been let out of the bottle. There was a generational shift around wellness and well-being. And the pandemic has intensified that exponentially for everybody. So what was an optional conversation is now a mandatory conversation between leadership and the employee base, it’s just something that people expect. In terms of relationship ROI. Like I said, our sticky wicket here is being able to show the correlation between your happiness, engagement, and productivity, and being able to draw that back to the quality and depth of the relationships that you have. We built a safety leadership program for an oil company. So you picture oil company employees, people out in the field. And they were having a safety issue and needed a safety program. So I wrote two programs, I wrote one very traditional skills based safety program. And then I wrote one very non-traditional Safety Leadership Program predicated on the idea that the more I like you, the more likely I am to look out for your well-being. And I went in to pitch this to the executive team. And I had both in my pocket, and I thought I could take the easy one that I know they’ll resonate with and probably take, or I could go out on a limb, and do this soft, fluffy relationshipy one. And they took it. And we delivered that program to over 1000 employees out in the field. And we were able to show an 18% reduction in what they call TRIR, Total Recordable Injury Rate. That when asked, their field personnel told us, it’s because I know that guy’s story, and I want to make sure he’s okay. He’s got four kids, and I want to make sure he goes home tonight. So when he’s not wearing his safety glasses, I say, hey, Richard, goggles, put them on. Only because I know him. Before the program, you were just another dude on site, who didn’t have his safety goggles on, I would probably elbow my buddy and say, check out that guy, he’s probably gonna lose an eye today. And I would go about my business. So we were able to correlate the data to show that it was in fact, the relationships that not only helped happiness, engagement, productivity, but that’s a base level of human interaction, safety. I want to make sure that you’re okay.

 

Richard Matthews  42:39  

Yeah, and that’s powerful. Because I’ve seen that happen. And you see that in the real world, you see a guy driving his motorcycle down the street driving like an asshole. You’re like, oh, that that guy’s gonna get himself killed. And then you see your brother driving down on the motorcycle? And you’re like, when he gets home I’m having a chat with him. Right?

 

Eric Spencer  43:04  

Yeah, exactly. Dude, stop driving like an asshole and put your helmet on.

 

Richard Matthews  43:08  

What’s going on? Right? Because the depth of the relationship changes how much you care about the outcomes for the other person.

 

Eric Spencer  43:14  

Absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be your brother. But to your point about the mugger, if I start telling the mugger my story, now he starts to care about my safety. So he’s less likely to harm me in a work context, if that base level of human emotion comes into play that readily, think about what we could do if we could harness that in terms of productivity in terms of ideation in terms of how we do whatever it is that we do. It’s power.

 

Richard Matthews  43:48  

Yeah, it’s interesting, one of the things I try to cultivate with my team, I have a small team, but I tried to find out and talk about it publicly with our small group is like, who they are and what they like doing and what video games they play on the weekend, and how old their kids are, and when their birthdays are happening, and one of my employees is having a baby. And I’m like, we had a, congratulations kind of thing. I’m trying to figure out what we can do for them because I have no idea. Because they are in another country, I’m like, I don’t know, I think we’re gonna make them a doll. If my editor is watching this, don’t tell them I think my wife is making them a doll for their baby. But either way, we try to make sure everyone sort of knows each other. Which is, I think it makes it more exciting to show up and to know the people that you’re working with. And if you’re passing tasks back and forth, if you’re passing tasks back and forth between another human that you care about versus just another cog in the machine. It changes the notes that you put in for context and the way that you communicate about it, it all changes when you care about the other person

 

Eric Spence  43:49  

Yeah, who are you going to prioritize? The person you like or the person you don’t know? Well, Richard sent me this, I’ll do that for him because I know he’s moving on to a new town today. And I want to get it to him before he rolls out of town. It’s that context. It’s that connection that makes the difference. I totally agree with you.

 

Richard Matthews  45:24  

Awesome. So the flip side of your common enemy would be your driving force, so just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, what is it that you guys fight for at SkyeTeam. Your mission, so to speak?

 

Eric Spencer  45:39  

Yeah, I mean, it’s shining the light on the power of the relationship aspect of doing work. It’s less about what needs to get done. And it’s more about how it needs to get done, and through who? That’s the driving force, for us, it’s shining the light on the power that relationships can bring as soft and fluffy as they can seem, as expected as they are. When we’re intentional about building them, developing them, and deepening them, we can get to the magic really quickly, being authentic and letting your guard down. In our new book, we talk about what we call an Ally Mindset. And one of the components of an Ally Mindset is courage and vulnerability. And as business people in general, American business people in specific, we’re socialized to believe that being vulnerable is being weak. And what we posit is that being vulnerable is being authentic, and the quicker you and I can both get there, and let the guard down, the quicker we get to the magic. The magic happens when you’re authentic, and so am I when you’re guarded, and I’m guarded, too, we’re gonna dance. And we may be able to get some work done, but we’re not going to take it to the next level. Being able to be vulnerable and having the courage to do so is a powerful enabler. So if we can change that perception around, why should I invest in relationships at work? I’ve got real work to do, I just need to get my shit done. If I can change that perception in 10% of the people that I interact with, I win, because those people’s lives are going to be different.

 

Richard Matthews  47:33  

I would posit that a lot of people think of it because you’ve referred to it a few times, relationships are soft and fluffy. And therefore potentially feminine and masculine. People don’t want to talk about relationships, and I would posit that learning to be good at relationships and learning how to be vulnerable actually, is the more masculine of the traits. And you just put this out there for people who are listening, if you know how to have a good relationship and how to do the stuff that we’ve been talking about, makes you sexy to the lady folks. 

 

Eric Spencer  48:06  

That’s right. You heard it here. Richard said it first.

 

Richard Matthews  48:13  

I’m just gonna put that out there. It’s not an unmasculine thing. And I would posit that you called it soft and fluffy, it’s not soft and fluffy. It’s a hard skill. And it takes like what you’re talking about, it takes courage and it takes an ability that you have to develop. Right?

 

Eric Spencer  48:35  

Yeah, it’s like any other muscle, you’ve got to practice flexing that muscle, or it will atrophy. And when that happens, you’re putting yourself, people around you, your organization at peril.

 

Richard Matthews  48:51  

Yeah. And I was like, just the example you used on the people who are working in the oil fields. Those kinds of crews. I’ve never worked on one. But I know some friends who have and they are rough and tumble guys. But relationships still change the outcomes.

 

Eric Spencer  49:10  

They care.

 

Richard Matthews  49:12  

Let me think about the rough and tumble.

 

Eric Spencer  49:14  

No. So it was interesting, in that program, we had them give what we call the safety stump speech. So essentially, they had to say why they cared about safety, why it mattered? And they had to share a story that made the concept of caring about safety real for them. And so many people told very powerful stories about people that they know, trusted, liked, some loved, best friends who got injured, who were killed, who had bodily harm come to them. And these rough and tumble very steel toed very big bearded people telling these stories, not a dry eye in the house at the end of these programs. And so as stereotypically masculine as those crews can be portrayed. Man, some of the richest humanity I’ve ever experienced in doing this kind of work happened out there in the oil fields of North Dakota.

 

Richard Matthews  50:18  

Because relationships are masculine. There we go. So I want to talk about some practical things, then. I call this your hero’s tool belt. Just like every superhero has their gadgets and gizmos, everything from batarangs to webslinger to the laser eyes are, or big magical hammers they can spin around and fly with, I want to talk about the top one or two tools you use in your business that you couldn’t do what you do without. It could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, something used for marketing tools, something you used for your product delivery, or your course delivery or program delivery, something that you think is essential to getting your job done.

 

Eric Spencer  50:56  

Two things, the first one is what we call the relationship ecosystem. So it breaks down relationships into four primary dynamics based on two axes. So the horizontal axis goes from me focused on the left to we focused on the right, and the vertical axis goes from conditional at the bottom to unconditional at the top. So if you start at the top, unconditional, that’s what we call an ally relationship. And that’s kind of what we aspire to in many, not all, but many of our relationships.

 

Richard Matthews  51:32  

Like a relationship with your kids. It doesn’t really matter what they do, if they kill someone, you’re helping them bury the body kind of thing.

 

Eric Spencer  51:41  

That’s right, you’re gonna show up as an ally, no matter what. If we slide down the conditional axis, we get into what we call supporter behavior. And supporters are interesting because they look like allies and a lot of ways but they are making assessments about whether or not they’re going to show up based on whether it’s good for them or not, they’re a little bit less willing to take the risk. So we got an ally and supporter, we move to the me side, you’ve got what we call rival behavior. It’s conditional, me first, I may be on your team, and I may help you do whatever it is that we need to do. But if it’s a good thing for me, and it’s got upside for me. And then it’s all me all the time. And that’s what we call an adversary relationship. So that’s tool number one is just being able to assess where are we and it’s a bi-directional thing. Where am I showing up for you, Richard on this grid? And where do I think you’re showing up for me? That has been super helpful for me in deciding how I show up in different relationships. I think I’m pretty great. So I think I’m an ally to everybody. But that’s not true. And when I’m sitting down in my quiet space, and I asked myself the questions and a lot of relationships, I’m showing up as a supporter at best, or a rival, and then I get to make a choice, what we like to call the luxury of choice. So that’s number one. Number two, if you remember nothing else about this conversation, the way to open up a conversation about where the relationship is, and where we both want it to go, is what we call the relationship pulse check. And it’s three questions, they’re super easy. Question number one, I would ask Richard, what’s working for you right now in this relationship? And he would tell me a thing. And then I would say, what’s not working for you? And this is that courage and vulnerability coming into play because I gotta be willing to hear whatever it is that you might say. And I might not like it. So what’s working? What’s not working? And then the third question is, what’s one thing that I could do to help ensure your or our collective success? So what’s working? What’s not working? And what’s one thing that I could do to help ensure your or our success? Super easy way to start a conversation? Bake it into your one on one process? Give a venue for feedback. It’s a cool thing very powerful tool. We use it all the time, and couldn’t do business without it.

 

Richard Matthews  54:12  

I almost feel like you could have all of the marriage counseling wrapped up in those questions. And it was interesting when you were going over the chart diagram, the me, we chart?

 

Eric Spencer  54:30  

Yeah, it’s the relationship ecosystem.

 

Richard Matthews  54:33  

Relationship ecosystem. I knew you had a fancy name for it. So the relationship ecosystem like as you were saying that I could see different relationships in my life poppin into those things. And it’s interesting, cuz some of those I’ve actively chosen to put them there because the other person is forcing me to put them there. 

 

Eric Spencer  54:48  

That’s right. 

 

Richard Matthews  54:49  

And that’s okay.

 

Eric Spencer  54:50  

That’s okay. That is 100% okay. It’s acknowledging that this is where it is. I’m okay with it. I’m not saying I’m willing to invest anymore, Because they aren’t. And I’m going to let that be. That’s okay. We can’t all be allies to everybody all the time. We just don’t have the bandwidth for that.

 

Richard Matthews  55:13  

But you certainly have the people that are in that unconditional we space in your life. That if the phone rings, you’re picking it up.

 

Eric Spencer  55:24  

Yeah, it’s interesting when you think about who those people are. We do an exercise in some of our workshops, where we ask people to think of the best boss or colleague that they’ve ever had. And they tell such amazing stories. And we get them to text those people or send them a note, email, or LinkedIn message or whatever, to say that I was in this goofy training class at work today. And I was asked about the most influential or best colleagues or bosses that I’ve ever had, and your name came up. And I just wanted to say, thanks, man, the responses that come back are so powerful, we always try to get a few people to share in the workshops that we do. And again, it’s like the safety stump speech, big burly guys, there’s rarely a dry eye when we stop sharing those stories because they are so powerful.

 

Richard Matthews  56:16  

Stories are the best tear-jerker in the world. I don’t want to call it pleasure, misfortune, or fortune of doing eulogies for a few family members. And I have been officially selected as the family’s speaker for the dead. Because my methodology is to just tell stories,

 

Eric Spencer  56:42  

You are the collective eulogist.

 

Richard Matthews  56:45  

They’re like you’re doing this from now on, I’m like, Oh, thank you for that.

 

Eric Spencer  56:48  

Oh really, but if you think about that from the departed’s perspective, well, that’s what I want. I want you to share those stories, to remember all of the amazing things that happen, not dwell on the negative, not dwell on the fact that I’m not here anymore. But let’s talk about all those cool things. Because you said it earlier. I mean, stories, they’re the currency that we measure life with. It’s powerful stuff.

 

Richard Matthews  57:17  

Yeah. And I remember my grandmother when she passed away, I spoke at her eulogy. And in my life, she was only ever just grandma. I was27, when she passed away, so I showed up for a funeral. I was expecting a small funeral. There were 750 people there. 

 

Eric Spencer  57:37  

She had an impactful day.

 

Richard Matthews  57:38  

She had an impact much larger than I was aware of because again, she was just grandma to me. And I remember I got up there. And the thing that I did, I was like, I don’t know her in any other capacity. I don’t know how she was as a mom, I don’t know how she was as a churchgoer, she was a high-powered executive at her insurance company. Like, I don’t know her in any of those roles. So I can’t speak to them. And I can’t tell you anything about them. So all I’m going to do up here is I’m going to tell you what she was like as a grandma to me. And then I shared a set of like, 15 or so stories from my life that were impactful to me. And that’s all we did. And I spent probably four hours shaking hands at the end of the time. They’re like, thank you so much for just sharing her story, a side of her that we never got to see because she only had a couple of grandkids. So very few people get to share that part of her story.

 

Eric Spencer  58:27  

Those other people just like you didn’t know her as those other elements in her life. They didn’t know her as grandma. And that’s powerful stuff. That’s good. That’s awesome. I love that.

 

Richard Matthews  58:37  

Storytelling is just such an important aspect of relationships and relationship building. And I know funerals are kind of a dark way to go. But that’s just kind of a way you were talking about.

 

Eric Spencer  58:48  

Hey, man, it’s your show. You can take it in any direction you want. We’ve gone from no pants to funerals, so we’ve covered a lot today.

 

Richard Matthews  58:56  

Yeah, from masculinity, like all of it.

 

Richard Matthews  58:59  

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Richard Matthews  1:00:30  

So I think the discussion of people who were important to your life is a great transition for my next question here, which is about your own personal heroes. And every hero has their mentors. Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan Kenobi, Robert Kiyosaki has his Rich Dad, even Spider Man had his Uncle Ben, or if you’ve watched the new movie it’s Aunt. May. But I want to find out who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers, or authors, maybe peers who were a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far?

 

Eric Spencer  1:01:03  

Yeah, it’s a great question. And they’re the folks that you share your career with, from whom you learn your craft. When I was coming up through the HR ranks, I had a boss, her name was Karen. And she was probably eight years older than me ish. So she had been around the block at another time and a half or so by the time I got there. And just watching the way that she showed up the questions that she asked the way that she really cared about the outcome for everybody involved. In HR, you’ve got a couple of archetypes in there, you’ve got the HR police, you’ve got the HR business partners, and you’ve got the people in between that are trying to figure it out. And she’s the one that taught me about connecting with people on a human level, and on an intellectual level around the business. HR people, in the old days, had the luxury of not having to know about the business that we were in, the things that we did, and why people bought our products. And HR people didn’t need to care about that. They just needed to make sure that people were inputting their time off in the right system in the right way. And she taught me that that’s kind of bullshit. That’s not how HR should be done. In HR is when it’s done well is all about connecting with folks and making sure that everyone is aligned to what the business is trying to accomplish. And that was a huge Eye Opener moment for me, in my  late 20s, early 30s. And to this day. She’s a mentor, she’s a friend, and somebody that I connect with on a regular basis.

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:54  

It reminds me of Good to Great. The difference between good companies and great companies is that the people care about the mission which is HR’s job.

 

Eric Spencer  1:03:06  

Right. And the mission isn’t just on a poster in the lobby. It’s something that we can all articulate, we believe in and we take action toward. Those are things that you don’t get from good poster wear.

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:19  

Yeah, the inspirational, the little black poster with the picture and the big white word on it.

 

Eric Spencer  1:03:23  

Right, exactly. Yeah. I always love that when companies roll out values, and you go into the lobby, and you see things like integrity, trust, I’m like, that’s table stakes. If you’re not doing that shit, you’re not here. You’re not employed here, go somewhere else.

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:40  

That’s the congratulations, you have reached the baseline.

 

Eric Spencer  1:03:44  

Right?

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:45  

You’ve earned the ability to show up and play in this game. Now, if you want to compete, let’s talk. 

 

Eric Spencer  1:03:54  

Let’s talk, exactly. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:57  

So I want to talk then, about your guiding principles. So one of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever puts them in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up this interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you run your life by, maybe something you wish you had known when you started out on your own hero’s journey.

 

Eric Spencer  1:04:20  

Yeah, I mean, wrapping it all into this concept of relationships and caring for them and nurturing them. I would say that the guiding principle for me is focusing on what I can do to help other people get where they need to go. And if that’s being a sounding board, I’ll be a sounding board. If that’s listening, I’ll listen. If that’s kicking your ass, I’ll kick your ass. Whatever you need me to do. It’s putting my ego in a subservient position. It’s trying to be deeply present in the relationships that are in my sphere at the moment, because we talked earlier about managing, we can’t be allies to everybody all the time, because we just don’t have the bandwidth. And if I identify my code, I want to be that person, where if we haven’t talked in six years, and we get on the phone, it’s like, no time has passed. It’s because I am so present in that moment, I’m able to be whatever I need to be, I’m able to be that empathetic ear, I’m able to do whatever is required in that moment, not just waiting for my turn to tell my stories about all the cool shit that’s been going on in my life, or how hard it’s been, we’ve all been in those situations, where did that person even hear me? Were they listening? Or were they just waiting for their turn to talk? So it’s being that trying to show up as the deeply present empathetic listener, to help people get where they need to be.

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:02  

You know, what’s interesting about that whole thing is that they are waiting for their turn to talk. This is that I have found personally, and hopefully, this is useful to someone listening. I live a pretty cool, interesting life, I’ve got all sorts of cool things. And so I’ve got fun stories to share. But I have found that if I want to share those stories with other people, the longer I spend listening to someone else tell their stories, they eventually run out of things to tell you. 

 

Eric Spencer  1:06:29  

That’s right.

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:30  

And then the thing that happens is they like, I want to hear your story now.

 

Eric Spencer  1:06:37  

If they feel heard, they feel validated. And then that opens that space to even ask about your story. If they don’t, or if you don’t let them get to that point, you’re competing for airtime. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:51  

Yeah.

 

Eric Spencer  1:06:52  

And nobody’s listening to the story.

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:55  

And nobody’s actually paying attention. But the other thing that’s really useful when it comes to building relationships is if you listen to the other person’s story, and you actually hear what they’re telling you, when it actually gets to the point where they turn around and they want to hear some of your stories, you can connect your stories to theirs. And that’s where the magic happens. Magic happens when you can show how your stories connect, where they relate. And anyways, I think there’s magic there.

 

Eric Spencer  1:07:24  

That’s when you make a best friend that you met in the park and had a random dinner with them. It’s being able to find those connection points. But to get there, you’ve got to be willing to listen first, and talk second, and be invited into that sharing space, it’s a thing that I think we struggle with. Because humans like to hear ourselves talk, we like to tell our stories because they help. Going back to that imposter syndrome point, they help us connect to the fact that hey, maybe that’s actually true. Maybe my story is as cool as I’ve made it sound. And it gives us our own self-validation. But being validated by somebody else is way more powerful than self-validation, for sure.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:11  

My favorite thing that happened recently is my son came running into my office right here, 

 

Eric Spencer  1:08:18  

This office? 

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:19  

Yeah, this office, this one right here, I’m like, I just happened to not be on a call at the time. So he was totally cool to just run and be like, Dad, and I was like, what? And he’s like, I learned a thing. And I was like, what did you learn? He’s like, we have two eyes and two ears, but only one mouth, which means we should spend twice as much time watching and listening than we do speaking. And I was like, high five buddy, it took me a long time to learn that.

 

Eric Spencer  1:08:43  

And how old is he? He’s 12 I think.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:45  

Yeah, he’s 12. 

 

Eric Spencer  1:08:46  

Yeah, I mean, that dude, learning that lesson at 12. He wins.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:50  

Yeah, he wins, he’s a great kid. I think that’s a great place to wrap our interview too just on the idea. We got two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. So spend twice as much time listening and watching as you do speaking. So I do end every interview with a simple challenge, though I call it the hero’s challenge. And I do this to help get access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own because as you know, not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I are doing. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come to share their story here, the first person that comes to mind for you.

 

Eric Spencer  1:09:30  

His name is Nahid. He runs a company that is exploding in Latin America right now. He is running this company from a position of not what they do, but about giving back and about giving forward about making the world a better place than it was when they got there. And that’s how they’re recruiting. That’s how they’re retaining and that’s how they’re differentiating themselves in a very crowded market in Latin America right now. What was that? 

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:06  

Conscious Capitalism.

 

Eric Spencer  1:10:07  

Yeah, and he is living it. I’ve known him for a decade. And he’s just a great guy and actually walking the talk on this one. It’s not just marketing speak. It’s not just something that shows up on the website. It’s who he is. And it’s been an amazing story to watch unfold. He’s killing it right now.

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:31  

Awesome. I’d love to see if we can get him on the show. We’ll see we get an introduction later. And sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no, but when we get a yes, sometimes there’s some of the best stories we get on here. Because they’re very unique. So in comic books, there is always the crowd of people who are clapping and cheering for the acts of heroism. So as we close, I almost said the acts of heroine. And that would have been bad.

 

Eric Spencer  1:10:53  

That’s an 80s metal story. That’s a very different story than a comic book story.

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:57  

Yeah, then the acts of heroism. So as we close, what I want to find out from you is where can people get your help? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and, and ask for your help in getting the relationships right in their company? And I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to raise their hand and actually flip the switch for the bat signal?

 

Eric Spencer  1:11:18  

Yeah, so you can find us at SkyeTeam.com, SKYETEAM, you can find me on LinkedIn. I am Eric S. Spencer over there. In terms of who should be flipping that switch. They are business leaders. It’s not just HR people. I think one of the things that’s interesting about our journey, we tend to work a lot with technology companies. And a lot of times the folks that are ringing that bat signal are CTOs and CIOs, as often if not more than they are heads of HR or CEOs in general, we tend to focus on the business level of ideas. So it’s those folks, that’s how you get us. I also run a podcast called The Corporate Bartender for HR people. If any HR folks are out there, they want a really awesome community of pretty amazing HR and people leaders. That’s where you’ll find us. I think that’s it.

 

Richard Matthews  1:12:18  

That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us today. Eric, it’s been an absolute pleasure. My last little question for you here. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

Eric Spencer  1:12:31  

I would say, I’ve said it 100 times in the last hour that we’ve been talking. Take the time, build, develop and deepen those relationships. If you’ve got one that’s a little bit wonky, and not where it needs to be. Ask those three questions go in that with that relationship, pulse check, what’s working, what’s not working, what’s one thing that I can do to help you be successful?

 

Richard Matthews  1:12:53  

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the show today, Eric. Really appreciate it.

 

Eric Spencer  1:12:55  

Yeah, thank you for having me, it was a blast!