Sam Donaghey
Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghy, and today I’m joined by FSM’s Director of Growth, Michael Johnson. Michael, as always, it’s fantastic to have you on the show.

Michael Johnson
Sam, it’s always a pleasure. Excited about today.

Sam Donaghey
100%. And today’s episode is one that you won’t want to miss. Today on the show, we’re talking with someone who helps CEOs level up their businesses. So whether you’re leading a multi-million dollar enterprise, or if you’re preparing for your next big role, today’s conversation will provide actionable insights.

Joining us today is Kurt Graves. He’s a seasoned leadership coach and an 11-year master chair with Vistage, the world’s largest CEO coaching and peer advisory organization. With over a decade of experience mentoring CEOs, Kurt has dedicated his career to helping leaders evolve both professionally and personally. So Kurt, it’s just fantastic to see you today and thanks for being with us on the show.

Kurt Graves
Thank you. I’m thrilled. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Michael Johnson
Absolutely. Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. We met initially at a Vistage Conference in Charlotte, and there you were my chair facilitator for a breakout session I was giving. And I’ve got to say, we’ve talked about this just before the podcast started, but I was blown away by the amount of energy you brought to the group. And it was inspirational to me. I was just like, I’ve got to know more about Kurt. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for giving me and our audience really an opportunity to learn more about you.

Kurt Graves
I think I start in high energy and just go north from there. So it was fun to be with you. It’s just always fun to turn a room on. So we had a good time. I know we did.

Michael Johnson
Absolutely, definitely. It definitely did that. Well, you know, I want to start with some of your background and you’ve had a tremendous career prior to this. Just looking at what you’ve done — COO, controller, CPA, entrepreneur. But I also want to dive into one role where you led an organization at Corona as CEO for the US ceramic tile operations. So I want to dive into that a little bit. I can imagine you had in that role a whole host of challenges. What are some of the top lessons you learned during that time?

Kurt Graves
Well, Corona is a fantastic company. First of all, I would say the best company I ever worked for. I just loved working for them. Great values. At that time, a 117-year-old, family-owned company. The resources were great. Probably the biggest lesson was that we were a greenfield. They had not been in the US up until that point in time.

We talk a lot about values in all our businesses — certainly that’s where it starts. They had a terrific set of values. And initially the thought was, we need to be coming to the US market — maybe our values won’t work for us. And our American leadership team said, no — we’re going to have the exact same values. The challenge will be to put them into a North American context, but we’re only going to have one set of values.

And I’m a big values person, but we believe what we think is how we act. That was the first big lesson: stay true to the values that got the founding group together and get aligned to that. That was the first thing we did right. There’s lots of things we didn’t do right, but that thing we got right.

Michael Johnson
So just with that, I’m sure a lot of people listening to this may not have spent a lot of time thinking about their values, or maybe they have. And it sounds like there was some intentionality there. If you’ve got that list of values, how do you put that into practice? What are some of the things you can do, especially as a CEO or an owner or a founder, to ensure that those values are entrenched in your organization?

Kurt Graves
You listen for values in the conversations. So when the company out of Colombia — Organización Corona — had the idea of coming to the States, their CEO came up along with his CFO and they interviewed about a dozen Americans in a meeting about their ideas of how they were going to enter the US market. At some point there was a question asked of the CEO.

Our plan was this — this is the size of business we think we’re going to go to. And I stuck my hand up and said, what if it’s not that number? What if it’s half that number? What are you going to do? And his name is Reynaldo — he’s a fantastic leader. And he laughed and he said, I don’t know. We will hire people who will make it their problem. I will hire smart people and they will make it their problem. And they will figure out how to get to the number.

And it was the first time I think I ever heard a CEO say, I don’t know. And he also had such a wonderful sense of humor. I got in the car after being in that meeting for a few hours and called my wife as I drove back from Atlanta, where we’d met, to Charlotte. And my wife said, you’re going to go to work for them, aren’t you? And I said, if they offer it, absolutely — because I can work for that guy. We shared the values.

So even if they weren’t stated, they had that humility. They had humor. Those are both important things to me from my background. So I would just say you listen for values when you’re interviewing people, and you test to see if they’re really your kind of people or not. The world’s big and life is short, so why spend a lot of time with people that don’t value the same things you do?

Michael Johnson
Absolutely, totally agree. And Sam, I’m sure you agree being a recruiting director — it’s about matching people with the values of the organization, and that’s the best fit for everybody. That’s a win-win. When someone’s working for an organization that aligns with their purpose, their applied skills, their background, their natural capabilities, and their values, it’s a win for the organization and a win for them.

Sam Donaghey
Plus, as a CEO, you can scale your business a lot faster if you’re hiring people who know things much more than you do, right? You can delegate and you can outsource as opposed to creating silos in different divisions. How do you communicate your values to your team or your organization to create that alignment, Kurt?

Kurt Graves
I think that leaders — I think everybody’s watching the leaders when they walk in the door and when they walk out the door. They’re paying attention to everything. So it’s how you behave. It’s what you put up with. It’s what you reward. It starts — since we were talking about interviewing — this is just a pet peeve of mine with members. I hopefully only see this behavior when they’re starting out early. But the reality is that when someone is coming in, that interview process is happening and it’s easy to get up, dust off the resume, and have a history. The real interview, unfortunately, for most people starts when the person comes to work. And it can be even if somebody is in a high-up role. In the interview process, they’re dressing up nicely and putting on a good face, and the company is just checking to make sure they have a pulse. No real work is being done.

If you’re thinking about how to interview for culture, it’s not hard. If one of your values is integrity, then somewhere along the line you need to be asking the question, hey, tell us about a time when you had a lack of integrity — and then stop talking and see what happens. And if they say, you know, I don’t really have a problem with that, then they’ve answered the question about honesty, because we all lack integrity. We all lack the character that is required of us in any moment of our life. We all miss on that. And that gets you to the right follow-up question, which is: hey, thanks for the answer — how did you fix that? That is not hard stuff. If people can’t answer those questions, you’ve got to move on. But it’s hard because it’s tough.

Supposedly tough to find people. So a lot of companies let culture slide. I think culture rules — that’s the number one thing.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah, so obviously you’ve got a massive focus on hiring the right people, Kurt.

Kurt Graves
Hiring the right people and getting them into the right seats. You know, the EOS model is right about that — not moving them around into places where they can’t succeed. The first job of a leader is to make people successful. That’s the CEO’s job — to make sure people have opportunities for sure.

Sam Donaghey
Yeah, actually you’ve also been a CEO. You’ve had a number of roles, but you’ve also got experience as an entrepreneur. What is the biggest contrast between those two roles, would you say?

Kurt Graves
So my entrepreneurship — I was living in Oklahoma years ago, moved here to Charlotte, North Carolina with my partner at the time. My wife and his wife — we all moved here together. It was amazing. And we started a business. It’s really different. When I was an entrepreneur, it really felt heavy. It was really all on us. Everything takes twice as long, it’s half as fun, everything costs double what you imagined. And the grind of that is just unbelievable. People become entrepreneurs, I think, because they want the freedom, but man, they’re tied down to a lot of things, especially early on. It’s just such a difficult thing to do.

Starting a company like we did inside Corona, where we were using their capital, was a good deal easier. It wasn’t my balance sheet. And when we moved to Charlotte and started our first business early on, we failed. We came within an instant’s breath of not surviving. It was the second hardest thing I’ve done, other than deciding to go from being a CEO to a coach, which proved to be equally difficult.

I think so. And that’s kind of back over on the entrepreneur side, doing my own thing again. So I just think that when you’re an entrepreneur, it’s really all on you. Many of my entrepreneurs want that freedom, so they lack the ability to really pay attention to details and do the hard work of operations. They may resist getting the right person to keep them on track — but that’s one of the best things they can do. Entrepreneurs are amazing. I work mostly with entrepreneurs.

Sam Donaghey
And is it a case of trying to shift their mindset and perspective on getting the right help at the right time? Do you come into those kinds of conversations often?

Kurt Graves
Yeah, always. A couple of things — always get the best people you can for the dollars you have and always be moving up. The people that got you where you are probably won’t get you where you want to go. That applies to the person in your own seat as the entrepreneur. Just because you started the company doesn’t mean you’ll be great at running it later as it gets larger. Accept your limitations, laugh at them, and get people in who can really help you. We all know this stuff — get better people than yourself. If your name is on the building, you’ve got a huge problem because you’re taking everything on more seriously.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, the theme here — the thread that I’ve heard you talk about — with your previous experience and now this, is the humility or the vulnerability to bring in outside advice, to bring in people who are going to challenge you, to say no. How important is vulnerability and humility from a leadership standpoint for an entrepreneur?

Kurt Graves
It’s really important. I think it was the Brené Brown quote that says we view vulnerability in ourselves as a weakness, but vulnerability in others as a strength. I don’t know why we don’t leverage that more.

I had a former member — she’s a graduate now and she has a new book out — and she recounts a conversation we had together. One thing I see sometimes is that members, entrepreneurs, all executives, don’t want to be personally responsible. That’s a kind of vulnerability we’re not comfortable with. We would rather pass the buck. We’d rather say things like, it’s hard to find good people. Why can’t they do it the way I do it? The founder’s dilemma even dwells in that zone. She and I were talking one day and she was not owning the results of her team. And I didn’t get pleasure out of it, but apparently I said something like, you know, you’re getting exactly the team you deserve. We’re all — if you don’t have a mindset about personal responsibility that says everything happening in my world is something I have some influence or say so in, then you’re going to come off as a victim. CEOs and executives live in that world.

So when we think about vulnerability, I think there’s real liberation in saying, hey, it’s on me and I missed. It’s not always my people — own that part of it. So I’m pretty strong on that.

Sam Donaghey
How much would you say success is defined by getting the best people in to do the best jobs, as opposed to creating great systems and luck as well?

Kurt Graves
Luck — right? You don’t have… I don’t know. I’ll say something that’s not going to go down the right lane and then I’ll come back the other direction.

Sam Donaghey
Because we talk about systems quite a lot during the podcast, right, Michael?

Michael Johnson
Yeah, absolutely.

Kurt Graves
You know, I have a friend who lived a really great, clean life. He lived his life by the right processes. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died inside of 90 days. He followed all the right processes. Sometimes life is just hard and work and circumstances don’t work well. On the other hand, we know processes must work because the market rewards them. If you have well-documented processes, if you’re actually following them, if you have great tools like HubSpot — and you’re actually having everybody use them the same way — it is a multiple factor of a couple of times different on your multiple if you go to sell, or the valuation of your business. Even more important than that, you’ll just make more money along the way and have more fun and fewer headaches. So the process — it’s both. But sometimes you have great processes and then life tells you something different. But then you’ll recover faster for sure.

I am a very — my personality is more creative, even though I was a CPA, which might be why I wasn’t there too long. But I benefit from following processes and everybody around me benefits when I follow them too.

Michael Johnson
You mentioned luck. One thing that we’ve seen is that people can get lucky, but to be able to take advantage of the luck, you’ve got to have some type of systems in place to execute on it. That market opportunity, that windfall, that right strategy at the right time — a lot of times businesses can become victims of their own success. They get a tremendous influx of revenue and now they kind of don’t know what to do or can’t handle the volume.

Kurt Graves
Absolutely. I think every time you grow your business by about 15% in revenue, you’re at another inflection point — and that happens really quickly early in businesses. A fellow chair of mine, David Zerfoss, uses this: most people dwell in what’s going on right now and they only think about what’s next. And that’s a trap. If they would think about what’s possible first — kind of come up higher — and then come down to what’s missing, and then come back down to what’s next, they would have a very different trajectory and a different set of opportunities. So “what’s next” is a very limiting question. To your point, if you have great systems, that’s usually one of the things that’s missing between companies that can continue to grow. Or like you’re saying — something happens, you get a great client, you feel good about it and you become satisfied, but what was really possible? That’s different. If you have great systems, you’re going to be able to take advantage and grow and just have more of whatever it is you want.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, and it’s not necessarily that the systems that got you where you are will take you to what’s possible.

Kurt Graves
Yeah. When I started Vistage, you have to have eight people to launch a group. I had to go out and find eight lonely business owners who thought they might want to hang around with me and the other folks. And I was not any good at it. I was a better CEO because I could bark at people, and I was terrible at coaching. But the systems are good, and I’ll follow the systems, and I had time to learn. And 12,000 to 14,000 hours later of coaching and 492 meetings facilitated as of this week — the process has made the difference for somebody like me who wasn’t naturally great at what they do. I don’t think I’m great at what I do. I just think I have great processes and I follow them.

Michael Johnson
Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, Kurt. You’re an 11-year master chair in Vistage. Can you tell us what a master chair is?

Kurt Graves
So in Vistage, we build peer advisory boards for CEOs and business owners. Those groups can have maybe as many as 20 folks in them and maybe be as small as 12. The master chair designation is truly a measurement of the size of the practice. Chairs that are master chairs are in the top 10% — there are about 650 to 800 chairs in the US globally. So you’re in the top 65.

Michael Johnson
What really drew you to Vistage, Kurt — from that CEO position to coaching?

Kurt Graves
I have early memories of being a leader from the time I was young, from the time I was on the playing field. I can’t tell you a time when I didn’t see myself as a leader. My passion for growing leaders came early too. But before I was at Corona — and at Corona in the US — I built two leadership labs for director-level folks. There’s a guy named Larry Bossidy — he was a GE exec and then went on to do some things himself. And he said, you could bet on anything — you could bet on strategy, you could bet on investments — but at the end of the day, you bet on people, because people do everything.

And I’m so grateful, going all the way back to my cross-country coach in high school, Chuck Shealy, who was a tremendous leader. If I had not run into him, I don’t know where I would have ended up — because he made me believe I could run, and that ended up paying for my school and a lot of great experiences and travel. He was a tremendous leader. So I’ve always been fortunate to be around great leaders. And then I’ve also learned from some really bad ones.

And I learned what a soul-killing experience it is to work for terrible leaders. So I’m passionate and have been for a very long time about growing great leaders, because I think they make a difference in the world.

And then I learned about Vistage, and I knew I wanted to do something on my own — something in human transformation. When I heard about Vistage, I was like, oh my gosh, I think I’d be great at this. I’d love doing it. So it’s just been a perfect fit for me.

And I work with all kinds of leaders. I might work with companies that have revenue of $3 million. And I work with CEOs of companies in the $1.2 to $1.4 billion range. They’re all the same.

Sam Donaghey
That’s a great point. You believe they’re all the same. I was going to ask you — how do the needs of CEOs across different revenue levels differ?

Kurt Graves
There’s a difference in complexity of mind — I think I’m taking that from another Vistage chair — and that’s so important. You could have a $10 million business, but it could require a lot of complexity of mind. So I think that leaders fall out in more transactional ways or, if their businesses are simpler, just more complex in that sense. There are differences there, but every company has got to get up in the morning and figure out some service to provide or some product to sell. They might have to make it or produce it or deliver it. They’ve got some people to do that. They’ve got to charge something for it, collect some money, and help people show up. In the end, they’re all in the same business — which is the frustration business. So if you put them all together, they’re all lonely and they’re all frustrated. They can all help each other be less lonely and less frustrated.

But their business is the same — we’re all humans. I think it’s a human thing.

Sam Donaghey
What would you say are common challenges that you see across all of your groups?

Kurt Graves
Blind spots. You only know what you know. You only do what you’ve done before. I think those are the two biggest ones actually. So gaining perspective. Maybe another one would be accountability. In the C-suite, we’d like to think that people are more accountable. I don’t know that they’re inherently more accountable. So I think people struggle with accountability at all levels of a company. We say we’re going to do things and we just don’t do them.

Making promises and not keeping them. Not doing things the way you’ve always done them. Not being able to see change when it’s coming at you. Ignoring data. Not even wanting data. Not paying attention to feelings and emotions. Wishing things would go away that aren’t going to go away. Procrastinating. If I’m talking to someone and asking them — what’s the mulligan? What’s the thing that, if you could have done it earlier last year, you should have? What was the mistake? It’s almost always that we kept somebody around too long. A peer group, a bunch of other folks, will help you be accountable to take care of that stuff earlier. We just don’t like the pain.

Michael Johnson
I can imagine, Kurt. We’ve already talked about vulnerability. A lot of these things are consistent across businesses that many leaders run into. What difference do you see with your members in that peer group environment versus people who don’t have that?

Kurt Graves
Take like someone who’s going to do a CRM or ERP implementation — I personally view that as if someone’s saying, I’m going to have to have a spine transplant. So who’s going to say, yeah, I’d love that — I’ll take two? It’s hard work. The last easy day you had was yesterday. Like, you’ve got to get to work. But if it’s the thing that’s necessary, and someone has come and sat down with their peers and they’ve talked about what’s possible if they have that CRM in place, and then they talk about what’s coming next — they can’t walk back in the room next month and say, well, we really didn’t go forward on it. Because if they do that, the other peers are going to say things like, you’re adorable. Now I see the problem more clearly. Let’s talk about you. You don’t keep your commitments. You don’t follow through. And so that power in a group is that people laugh at each other and poke fun at each other and they make people do spine transplants. You’ve got to do the hard work. Does that make sense?

Sam Donaghey
100%, yeah. Pointing out the blind spots and then making sure that everybody’s accountable the next time. Yeah.

Kurt Graves
Yeah, and have a laugh. Have a laugh, right? Don’t shame people. It’s hard, hard stuff.

Sam Donaghey
Right. And how would you define success for the leaders that you work with? Is there a measurable way of doing that?

Kurt Graves
Boy, they have to define that themselves. Just this morning — so I’ll use myself as an example. I always felt that I was a bit different from other people because I have a part of me, coming from where I came from, that’s very adventurous but also numinous. I love to hike. I hiked up Mount Whitney last year by myself. And I come to life in the mountains. It’s kind of numinous for me. It’s just wonderful. That feels like a kind of life — and for me, that feels like a kind of success. Somebody else wouldn’t want that.

Strangely, I’m also a person who — if you were testing me — you’d find this guy not only cares about spiritual things, he equally cares about money. I have my original piggy bank still, with my favorite coins in it from when I was just a little kid. So success for me — I keep score. I don’t mind saying that. I’m competitive. I keep scoring dollars. I keep score in my practice size, customer satisfaction, all those things. But what really gets me going is when — like yesterday, in one of my groups — I created this thing called the Vistis. It’s like the Oscar Awards or like the Swifties or whatever, right? And so I imagined every single member — like, what was the essence of what they deliver to others in terms of how they make other people better? One of the members I decided was the John C. Frémont Award winner. You may not know who that is, but he was a guy who grew up in the 1800s who thought he was going to make money as a pathfinder to the West. He was the first military governor of California, got fired for insubordination — which says something about my member — and then he bought some land in Monterey and got lucky because they found gold on it, and he ended very, very well.

And I think it’s okay when you keep scoring money and find meaning too. For me, so I think they have to define it themselves. Some people want lifestyle businesses, but they have to be reminded that they probably don’t want to tell their vendors they’re only in it for the lifestyle — not a very good piece of communication. On the other hand, some people want to make gobs of money and have lots of houses and they have perfectly miserable lives. So we have to let them make some mistakes and figure out what success is for themselves.

Michael Johnson
What about for new Vistage chairs who might be listening to this, Kurt? If you could talk to a new Vistage chair about how to grow a chair practice they love, what would you say to them?

Kurt Graves
It’ll happen over time. The great thing about being a coach versus being an executive is that if you do this kind of work authentically, the work will end up doing you. I’m sure I was dutiful. My wife would say — I’m sure we were always going to be married forever, but I’m not sure what kind of marriage we would have had if I hadn’t become a Vistage chair.

Michael Johnson
So transformational. That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s worth it.

Kurt Graves
Yeah. So I think if you’re going to do it, it’s going to be work that does you.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, people are worth the investment and you get that reward. That’s amazing.

Kurt Graves
Yeah, and it’ll beat you up first. Because — and this is not my model, I don’t know where I got it — if we had a matrix, a four-box, and the Y-axis was support and the horizontal axis was challenge:

Many leaders are high in one or the other. So if they’re high in support and low in challenge, they’re going to create cultures of entitlement. Actually, this is Jeremy Kubicek’s model. But they’re going to have lower profits. I guarantee you the relationships are going to be thin. People are going to think the boss is kind of a pushover. You could have a culture where challenge is higher, and you would get better results — I think your numbers would be better — but you’ll burn people out and you’ll have a culture of domination. But the real thing, the thing that really unlocks liberation and growth and transformation and profits, is — as he would say, and I agree — high challenge, high support. So being a coach means that you have to deliver both to other people. When someone needs a kick in the pants — or a slug to the head — you’re going to hit them twice. And sometimes you’re going to tell them they’re not near as bad as they think they are.

You can’t do that authentically for other people until you’ve gotten slugged in the head a couple of times yourself and had someone pick you up out of the ditch too. So it’s very humbling work and it’s very transformational. So if somebody said they wanted to do this, I’d say welcome — and get ready. You don’t know what you’ve signed up for.

Michael Johnson
Put your helmet on!

Sam Donaghey
So Kurt, looking at some of your background — you’ve built leadership development programs, you’ve coached, and now you’ve chaired multiple Vistage groups. It seems like you’ve always sought to invest in and develop people. So why are people a worthwhile investment?

Kurt Graves
I think for me, it’s a spiritual question. I believe that people have inherent value. They may not know it. People may not see it, but to be human is to be magnificent. And being magnificent is something that can be brought out more. It can also — the truth is that humans can be incredibly vicious and horrible.

So I don’t think we have a choice. Love is more powerful than shame, but shame runs a close second. So it’s really important in my life to treat every human as best I can as valuable. And if they’re valuable, then I need to value them and do what I can for my neighbor — serve them. So I think that’s the essence of real leadership: to value people and to leave them better than how you found them.

Sam Donaghey
It sounds like you’d be a proponent of servant leadership — would that be fair to say?

Kurt Graves
Yeah, yes, except I never quite know what it means anymore, right? It’s such a — I think I’m a fan of love. And I think I just said it, and I’ll say it again: love is the most powerful thing in the universe, but shame runs a close second. That’s what I’m a proponent of — love. I think love wins.

Sam Donaghey
Amazing. Love that.

So as we wrap up, we do like to ask our guests for a quote or a piece of advice that’s inspired their journey. Is there a quote that you’d like to leave with our listeners today?

Kurt Graves
You’ve queued me up well, and I think I might have two now — I thought I would only have one. Okay, so the first goes this way. It’s a leadership quote: the first job of the leader is to define reality, and the second job of the leader is to say thank you when they’re not doing the first. And I think if you’re a leader, there are all kinds of competing ideas of what reality is in your business and your organization. Spend time defining what reality really is — not in a really nasty way, but talking about what is real, what is really happening. I don’t think we can ignore that. But also just having a genuine thankfulness.

Another quote I love is by Walker Percy. He was a significant writer who won the National Book Award. And I use this script in my email. He said, I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one that really wants to listen. And when it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is really something to see.

I think it’s such an encouragement for us to just listen to people. Because listening — being listened to — feels like love. And of all things, to entrepreneurs and business owners, somebody who will listen to them talk about their business feels like love to them. And they’re amazed that they found somebody else who really cares. So that’s what I do.

Sam Donaghey
Wow, absolutely amazing.

Well, that wraps up today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. A big thank you to Kurt Graves for sharing some amazing insights today. If you’d like to learn more about Kurt’s work, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or via the Vistage website at vistage.com. We’ll add those links in the show notes. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can explore past episodes at fastslowmotion.com.

And if you have any topics you’d like us to cover or questions about what we’ve discussed, you can reach out to us at fastslowmotion.com/podcastfeedback. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you again next time.