Ep #474: Unlocking the Power of Authenticity and Servant Leadership in Business - with Andre Davis

David Saltzman: 0:01

This is a relationship business. It always has been and it always will be. So what should you be doing to build new relationships and strengthen the relationships you currently have? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Host: 0:18

This is the Shift Shapers podcast, connecting benefits advisors with thought leaders and entrepreneurs who are shaping the shifts in the industry.

David Saltzman: 0:32

And to help us answer that question, we have invited the inimitable Andrei Davis. Andre Davis, communication specialist, public speaker and president at a firm that sounds like an oxymoron, and he's going to explain to us why it isn't. Humble Genius, Andrei, welcome to the podcast.

Andre Davis: 0:46

Well, thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to the discussion, for sure.

David Saltzman: 0:51

My pleasure. So okay, humble Genius oxymoron or thought process behind it.

Andre Davis: 0:56

Well, so let's clear that up. So Humble Genius is. I don't know what that is right Because I'm with built interior construction, so the Humble Genius. I'm a little confused, but I don't know what that is.

David Saltzman: 1:07

Okay, then we're going to start all over again, but that's.

Andre Davis: 1:10

I was like what? And then not president.

David Saltzman: 1:12

So I'm thinking of I know where it came from. It came from the form that you sent me for the pre-interview.

Andre Davis: 1:18

I don't think I sent the form back. I did not.

David Saltzman: 1:21

I thought you did.

Andre Davis: 1:22

I didn't know there was a form. I didn't know. There was a form.

David Saltzman: 1:24

Yeah, when you made the appointment for the pre-interview.

Andre Davis: 1:27

Okay, I don't know where the Humble Genius would have came from.

David Saltzman: 1:29

I have no idea.

Andre Davis: 1:30

I have no idea Well okay, we can roll with it, so we'll start that out.

David Saltzman: 1:34

No, no, no, no. We'll start over again. So tell me how you are, what we built.

Andre Davis: 1:39

So built interior construction. So it's built interior construction or just built. And then my role there is the corporate and community engagement executive there, and so I'm the external person out working with leaders within companies to solve problems.

David Saltzman: 1:55

Corporate and community engagement. Did you say executive? Got it Okay, so that was just a practice. We're going to do this again. I love it.

Andre Davis: 2:05

I love it. I was trying to roll with Humble Genius. I've been called the many things Humble Genius.

David Saltzman: 2:08

I don't know if I've ever been called that, so yeah, I will find out what part of my brain that can. Maybe I was back in the 70s and it sounded flashback.

Andre Davis: 2:17

You know, your brain had a fire, a misfire.

David Saltzman: 2:20

So I had something that starts with F and has four letters, but I'm not sure that it was a fire. All right, we'll start again. I love it. This is a relationship business. It always has been, it always will be. So what should you be doing to create new relationships and to strengthen and deepen the relationships you already have? You'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Host: 2:49

This is the Shift Shapers podcast, connecting benefits advisors with thought leaders and entrepreneurs who are shaping the shifts in the industry. And now here's your host, David Saltzman.

David Saltzman: 3:02

And to help us answer that question, we have invited Andre Davis. He's a communication specialist, a public speaker and the corporate and communication engagement executive at Built. Andre, welcome to the podcast.

Andre Davis: 3:15

Hey, it's a blast to be here on Friday. Thanks for inviting me, and I'm excited about this.

David Saltzman: 3:19

My pleasure, my pleasure, we're glad to have you. So let's get right to it. What do most folks miss about the importance of relationships?

Andre Davis: 3:27

I think what happens when you're in your Think about your target, your target prospect or a potential company you'd want to do business or an individual you'd like to meet. We tend to only think about what benefits are us right as? What can we attract or get out of someone? If you would pivot that and you figure out what impact you could have on someone, your effort to get whatever you wanted from a company whether it's working with a company, getting their business, being able to have them put you on a board it would happen faster. So what happens is we go in. We have an agenda.

Andre Davis: 4:02

What I teach and what I coach around is don't have an agenda. The only agenda is to learn about the person you sit in front of and what are they trying to do, what's hard for them now, whether it's in the business, their personal life or whatever and have a discussion around that, and then that will lead you everywhere you need to go and I know that sounds more simple than it is, but it's really that simple, with some other steps and layers attached to it.

David Saltzman: 4:27

Can you give us a practical example? How does that actually sound when you're having that conversation?

Andre Davis: 4:32

So here's a great example. So we're in the construction business and we do prefab offsite manufacturing. It's really, really clean and it's really sustainable. The challenge with that is most people don't understand what our business is, and so we identified some industries that we wanted to do business with. The approach we were taking is from a product standpoint, so we were thinking, hey, we could help you build something. We were trying to transact work. I thought we could take a different approach, and so what I did was got access to the CEO of those organizations or the organization, and I said I'd love to learn more about your story. And we sat down and we talked and we had a great conversation. I was invited back.

Andre Davis: 5:09

That conversation went a little bit over three hours and from there they wanted to know more about our work and they were asking a lot of questions. Because in the beginning, what I do and what many of us that are servant leaders or go-givers do, is we ask a lot of questions. We're really authentically trying to figure out who is this person that has this title of a CEO, what was their pathway to that role and what do they need help with and how could we be valuable first, and other people are trying to figure out. How do I throw out questions I have an agenda and then pull my agenda in front of what they want to talk about, because I want to talk about my agenda and I don't care what you talk about. That is a transaction. They're going to put you in a box of other people that try to get access to them, and oftentimes the lift to get them to move in any direction towards you gets a lot of energy and a lot of work.

David Saltzman: 6:01

That is so critically important. You know, as I may have mentioned in our off-air discussion, I'm a story brand certified guide and one of the disciplines in story brand is understanding that in your client's story, they're the main character, they're the hero, you're the guide, and I think that speaks to the whole servant leadership mindset. A lot of people misunderstand servant leadership. What's your definition? If someone just pops into you at a cocktail party and says hey, andre, I've heard about this thing that you talk about called servant leadership, what is it?

Andre Davis: 6:36

That is a great question. I've never been asked that, but I haven't answered for that. Servant leadership is really this Are you willing to serve people when they can do absolutely nothing for you? You know you're a servant leader. When you're doing that work, when it absolutely doesn't benefit you, are you still willing to engage? And then the question becomes why would you engage if it doesn't benefit you? It benefits you because down the road what people talk about are the experience in front of you, and what happens is CEOs talk to CEOs, venture capitalists talk to venture capitalists, cfos hang out with that's just what they do.

Andre Davis: 7:17

And your true brand in any business you run is what are people saying in a room where you don't exist? And if they're not talking about you in a room, you don't have a brand. And that's the point, blank truth, right? And so what I've tried to create over a number of years is this value proposition that I'm gonna dump value first and, quite frankly, the value that you receive is directly tied to what you give. So when you give value, exponentially, grow your value. There's an old saying if you wanna grow your power, give it away. That means serving people, bringing people in that can help them without it impacting you. Now, why does that matter? Some people think that is counterintuitive. It's not counterintuitive. The reason that makes sense is because human nature says why is this person doing all this work when I've done nothing for them? Then they start to look in and go well, how do I pay Andre back because he did all this work on the front end? Well, what does Andre need? And then they reach out to you and go well, how can I be valuable to you? And then that's your opportunity to describe kind of what you think you might be able to bring from an ideology kind of a point of view.

Andre Davis: 8:32

What we do is we try to transact business in what I would call if we were dating. We don't wanna date our people, right? We don't wanna date our clients, we just wanna consummate. That's the problem. And you get thrown in a box. And so the way to get out of the box and have some uniqueness is to really be this servant leader where you're trying to figure out what would be helpful to you, where could I be helpful to you, and whatever that looks like.

Andre Davis: 8:57

And we oftentimes we don't have to know that in the first meeting, what I'm after and what many of us are after David is how do we get invited to the second meeting? The second meeting is where everything can happen, and I've gone into industries that I know nothing about and had tremendous success, because what I am really good about and good at is this people business extracting information from people that ordinarily they would never share with someone else. In my shoes, I'm able to build trust quick, build relationships quick and really behave like that, and it's really a behavior. It's not a verbalization, it's a behavior. There's a lot of people that say, oh, I'm a servant leader, but when you look at their behavior, you're like well, you're not, you're transacting business, and it's a completely different skill set.

David Saltzman: 9:44

It seems to me that it is not a whole lot different Correct me if you disagree than making friends.

Andre Davis: 9:52

Totally so. Think about this David you were married, I'm married. Think about if we met our wife at a coffee shop the first time and we spent 48 minutes talking about how great we were, I'm guessing your wife, my wife, would say I don't want any more of that. But if we had went in and said tell me about yourself, where'd you grow up, how did you get here, where'd you go to school? And we were really intrigued and authentically curious about the people we sat with. Why would they not want more of that? Your clients are no different.

Andre Davis: 10:25

The problem with people they don't think there are other people trying to get on their calendar. They think they're the only one. There are thousands of people trying to get access to the same people you want access to and you're all behaving the same way and so they're gonna love you. And the difference about me is I mean it when I go into a meeting, I have absolutely zeroed gin. Do I have intelligence about a company? Of course. Do our reveals set intelligent? No, they have to self reveal. And then I question around that, based on what I've heard, and I'm reaffirming and confirming whether that's a true thing that they wish to solve, because sometimes it's. Yeah, it'd be nice if we could solve, but I'm just really not that serious about something. We really have this problem.

Andre Davis: 11:07

So then you can dig in deep on that problem, figure out well, how long has that been a problem? Why haven't you figured it out? If you could figure out, what would you do about it? It's all those things. And think about dating the person that you see that you have an interest in. You're never gonna sit there. Most people will never sit there for an hour and talk about how great they are. But you know what those same people say I wouldn't do that. And they get in front of a prospect, david, and they do that. They talk about themselves and the history of their company and what products they do, and all that, and no one cares until they have to care.

David Saltzman: 11:40

That's really true. We get it all the time. We'll look at websites are a great example because they're so ubiquitous. Websites do two things. One, they talk about how the watch is made, and all a prospect really cares about is what time is it? That's right and is that time accurate? But the challenge, I think, is the other part of asking really good questions, and I used to tell my sales folks all the time when I managed a bunch of them, the word listen and the word silent have the same letters in them. How do you train yourself? If you're a traditional salesperson and you go in and you're used to pitching product and that's not really working because, as you point out, the entire universe is pitching product, how do you train yourself? What are the first steps you need to take practically to start transforming yourself into somebody who learns more about the prospect and listens a lot more?

Andre Davis: 12:33

Yeah, that's a great question. I have not had that question on a podcast, so I commend you for that question. That's a really good question. Here's what I would say Active listening. And here's an example. I'm married to a founder of a business. She's had a business for 15 years. There are moments in the business when the business gets hard and she'll ask me a question. I have two questions for her. Every time she asks me a question, Am I listening to respond or am I just listening? What do you need me to do? Sometimes it's just listen. Sometimes she wants feedback.

Andre Davis: 13:05

When you don't have an agenda, you are already training yourself to active listen and when you act and hear this out, when you're actively listen, you have to give up control. The reason you give up control is because the client or prospect is gonna take you in an area that you never thought about. But at the end of the day, your job is to solve problems and bring ideas to a client that you can work on. That is important to them. And if you have an agenda, your agenda says to a client or prospect my agenda is what's important. When you're working with clients through active listening, again you give up control because your client's gonna take you in the way and go. You know what we really wanna solve this. We haven't been able to do whatever. That is what, if it's benefits we haven't been able to give out? Create a 401K for our employees. We really are interested in that. You might have thought that they wanted better health benefits. They really are focused on how to help their employees create generational wealth. That's their focus. Now you need to go where that focus is and so you're asking questions and what you do is you go deep to get with. That's how you do this and what they're gonna do is share and they're gonna confirm and tell you what is important, and your response to that is not to solve it right then your response is to go deeper in the questioning.

Andre Davis: 14:26

How long have you had a challenge trying to figure out a 401K? What's prohibited you from getting a 401K? If money was no issue and you really wanna do a 401K, what would that look like for you and the company and the employees and what would they want back? All that questioning is gonna lead you because no one's doing that and even what I try to do in our business of construction and things that we do is I'm really trying to figure out what really is. What is the thing that they're really focused on? That's urgent and how do we solve that now? And it means that you're patient and even if you have to step back and say, you know, I have some ideas around that, if it's okay with you, can I just sit on that for a little bit and I'll get back to you. No one does that, by the way, but to the client it means everything, because it means you're really intrinsically involved in trying to help them figure out a solution.

Andre Davis: 15:18

And when that happens, you get out of the price game because now you've added value and they see you more valuable. Now you're not bickering about points. If you're in banking or pricing, Well, this company was gonna do it for that, but we made you think. Did that company make you think you didn't have an answer to a 401k? We brought you an answer.

Andre Davis: 15:39

That value proposition will get you out of the price game and a lot of people just don't realize that. So they think it's counterintuitive because they've never experienced it. Once you experience it, it's really the only way to behave. So what I say is don't have an agenda. Focus on learning about who is important. You have it so easy there. You have no idea how easy it is because you can look on LinkedIn. You can figure out what they went to college, what was their last career, what boards they set on, what they're involved in, what they posted, who they're connected to. You have so many talking points to be able to navigate, building what I call a very authentic, sustainable relationship, and you just have to lean into that, because what will happen is they will ask you to do business. You won't have to ask them anymore.

David Saltzman: 16:22

You used the word authentic and that's one of the things on my notes to talk to you about how important is it, while you're doing this, to be authentic and how easy is it for potential clients to see through people who are inauthentic?

Andre Davis: 16:38

Great question, tim. Yeah, authenticity is the secret sauce, right? Here's an example. In the pandemic we worked with a lot of healthcare companies and systems and you know we knew we had ideas that we could solve through the pandemic. Because we build really fast, we build off-site, so it's sustainable and it's clean. And because of my experience doing this for as long, one of the things I wanted to do in the pandemic is not continue to pick up and try to do business. It just didn't make any sense. So what I did instead was the people that I were talking to about potential business in the pandemic. I called and said how are you? How are things going? What do you need? Where could I be helpful to you?

Andre Davis: 17:19

If you're not doing that on a daily basis authentically not because you want the business you're not doing that authentically, you're not going to build the kind of sustainable relationship to be able to work smarter, not harder, in any business. You're going to always have to grind it out, make a ton of calls, do all these things. Pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. This is about working with people and caring about the people that you work with. If you want to be in the transaction business, maybe B2B is not your thing. Maybe there's another way that you can do it. But when you're in the business and you're working with senior level people, they can see through the hook, they can see through the bait and sweat.

Andre Davis: 17:59

So if you say, hey, I really care about how are you doing in the pandemic, hey, listen, so we had this project or this product and I wonder if I think it might solve all. You don't even know what the problems are yet. Why not just ask? It's just easier to ask and separate yourself and it's just good thing you can ask your doctor.

Andre Davis: 18:14

If you walked into your doctor's office and you had never had any communication with your doctor, he said look, I'll tell you what take three of these pills for, and then I'll tell you what next week, get four more pills, and then we'll just figure out how you feel. From there we would look at those people crazy Like you never even asked me one question, but you're administrating medication to me. It's no different. We're trying to figure out where the pain is in a business and you've got to ask questions. And if you ever read anything about Adam Grant the book that I love, the Stink Again, power of Knowing, what you Don't Know is what said is that your statement to questions ratio should go way up, so your questions supersede your statements when you're really trying to build relationships. But if your statements are building more than your questions, you're presenting and you can't learn anything about a client if you're presenting.

David Saltzman: 19:05

Well, it's interesting to use the analogy of doctors and medicine, because we used to tell our sales folks that if you prescribe without diagnosis, there's a word for it. It's called malpractice. It's true story, and it doesn't end well for anybody. It's expensive too. It is very expensive. It's expensive for everybody. You mentioned the title casually you mentioned of another book called Go-Giver, which is a Bob Bergen and John David.

David Saltzman: 19:29

Mann. We'll put links in the show notes to both of these books, because they're both terrific books. How did that affect you when you read that book? Or did it just validate the way you do business?

Andre Davis: 19:39

The latter. So I was meeting with someone years ago I didn't even know about the Go-Giver. And I'm meeting with this gentleman in Kansas City and I'm describing what I'm describing to you, david, and I'm talking about how we do business, how I do business, how I'm wired, how I learn this, why it makes so much sense. And he says to me have you ever read the book the Go-Giver? I said absolutely not. I never heard of the book. He goes everything you talked about is the Go-Giver. So immediately I got the book, read the book, I communicated with Bob. It's a fantastic book. So it validated everything I felt like I wanted to do in terms of working. I've always loved people. I just didn't know how it would interact with people in business and so I was in systems where it was scripts. It was if they say this, then you say that, and that never felt authentic to me. It never felt natural.

Andre Davis: 20:25

The Go-Giver philosophy is such a simple philosophy Helping people first before you ask for anything, giving value first before you ask for anything and it does so many things. Again, your value's tied to the value you give. So if you're questioning as an individual or an organization, your value is because you're not giving value first. You're asking right, we're always got our hand out. Hey, I love to do this, or in our business, I'd love to work on your project? I don't do that and one of my philosophy is in how I work, and it's non-negotiable. I never mentioned the name of our company until I'm asked by someone. If you don't ask me, I'll never tell you. And because it doesn't matter, what matters is tell me about you. What are you trying to do? Are there people in this community that you want to connect with that you haven't? Why haven't you? What would be valuable about me helping you in that arena? And that's the value, so that when you are able to do business with a client, they're not worried about the costs, because the value you've already given is what they're after and cost doesn't matter at that point.

Andre Davis: 21:27

There's always a budget. I'm not saying there's not a budget. I'm saying they're not gonna nickel and dime you and they're gonna see you more value when someone else that comes and go. Well, we could do it 20% cheaper. Where were you three years ago when Andre was helping me do all these really cool things? So they're gonna see more and I've seen that in our business of construction where I came in five years ago, didn't know anything about construction and I've been able to win work, not talking about construction, certainly not having experienced construction but really trying to really get intelligence and build relationships there and try to figure out where could I be helpful to them beyond what the construction world is.

Andre Davis: 21:58

Where could I be helpful? What I found is those people lean way in on you and they ask you certain questions like if we were gonna build something, where would your company help us? Don't answer that, ask them why are you building something? Tell me about that process. What's driving you to build something? Our tendency? Because we wanna fix things, we wanna come up with it. I'm telling you there's a discipline about not answering and redirecting.

David Saltzman: 22:25

Well, and that wanting to fix thing back to the example of your wife and the two questions that you always ask that's a guy thing and I don't know why it's a guy thing, but it's a guy thing. I'm sure there are women that do it also, but it's usually ascribed to we males and it's frustrating. What's interesting is that, unfortunately, the bar is so low right now that it doesn't take a lot of sweat, and we were counseling a client the other day and their website I'm going to go back to the websites because they're ubiquitous and everybody understands them but their website was a brochure for their company. Well, here's the answer Nobody's gonna engage with you because of that. Well, but we think it's important. Oh, it is important. So here's what you do Put that into corporate brochure and a week before your meeting with the client, send a handwritten note with that brochure that says hey, I'm looking forward to our meeting and I want our meeting to be all about you, but before we get there, I thought you might like to learn a little bit about us.

Speaker 4: 23:22

I love that.

David Saltzman: 23:23

What does that tell that person? And it gets the same thing. You're talking about it's. This meeting is about you. I want to learn about you. I want to hear about your challenges. What's hard for salespeople, I think, to understand that I'll bet you've encountered this is if you just stop talking, they will tell you exactly what they need and exactly when they need it and why they want it. That's exactly what else do you need to be successful?

Andre Davis: 23:47

That's right and so what we're taught. Sometimes there are systems at work and I mean that culture and organization that says you must knock out 28,000 calls in a month. You must call 100 people a week Instead of saying you know what, who's someone that's really connecting the community. Could I build a relationship with them and be helpful to them? And then, if I ever needed help, would I have the autonomy to be able to reach out and help? The challenge is and you said it oftentimes we're not even asking for help.

Andre Davis: 24:16

I feel like I'm pretty connected in the business community and there are times where I want to meet a CEO and I'm just not connecting yet. Would it be easy to send them a LinkedIn message? Yes, but it would also be easy if I asked someone that knew them really well. Could I grab coffee with this person just to get to know them better, with no agenda? And here's how I treat this. There's a system here and I won't name. There's a system that had a CEO that I kept hearing about and I said I need to meet this person. And I said I want to be really quick because nobody was short on time, but I said I want to meet this person I've heard. I want to meet CEOs that are really doing great things right With their culture, their people, et cetera. And so I got, I got brokered in the conversation and said if you come out to where our hospital is and you know, do the tour, he'll come down. So he came down and his and I'm the first question and I had intelligence, as I do research, my people that I'm trying to interact with and I said tell me what you're doing out here. Like, what are you focused on? And he said I am focused on hiring diverse nurses. And I and I said tell me about that. Like, why is that so important? He says it's important in our system that people that are getting cared for have people caring for them that look like them, and I love that. And I said you know, I play in the diversity, equity, inclusion space. If I could ever be helpful, I'd love to be helpful. Now is that? Is that? How are we doing business right if I'm doing that? So here's what happens. So I do that, I do the tour. He leaves for another meeting and in about three minutes he texts the lady that set up the tour and says I really like that guy. I need to see him again. Remember, the second meeting is what you're after, cause you can really talk all the stuff you want.

Andre Davis: 25:56

The second meeting, at his expense at a country club, went three hours and we talked about a lot of different things. 95% was getting to know him and how that and then five minutes he brought up the topic of construction. I asked questions behind that. I said you should meet our team. We were having we're talking about bourbon and wine. I said you should meet our team. And they came down a couple of weeks later.

Andre Davis: 26:22

And here's what I don't do, and this is important you should never bait and switch people. Here's what I mean by that. Don't say I want you to come down for a beer or libation or lunch and then slide in a slide deck. Don't do that, it's gonna ruin your reputation. So where's what I did? We invited them down for the bourbon and the wine. They came down the in our experience center, look around. And they had their bourbon. And they're walking around and they say, well, can we talk about your work? And I said absolutely not. That's not why I invited you. I invited you down for the bourbon and the wine.

Andre Davis: 26:54

And his answer keep in mind. This is a CEO of a system, a message system. He says to me Andre, could we just do both? And I said do you really want to do both? Because I think we can do both. So guess what we did with their permission. We sat in our conference room with some bourbon wine and we started to talk about our business. Because they asked the problem that people have is they think they always have to make the ass, and you don't. You have to build the relationship first. It's a faster way to revenue and we can prove that. It's data, we can prove that it is.

David Saltzman: 27:25

And that is a great place to end our conversation for today. Andre Davis, public speaker, communication specialist all around nice guy, corporate and communication engagement executive for built. Andre, thanks so much for the conversation. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

Andre Davis: 27:41

It was a joy. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 4: 27:48

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