Andrew Temte With Skills Owl

Intro: [00:00:08] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for workplace wisdom sharing, insight, perspective and best practices for creating the planet’s best workplaces. Now here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:31] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Workplace Wisdom Stone Payton here with you this afternoon, and you folks are in for a real treat, please join me in welcoming to the Broadcast with Skills Owl LLC. Mr. Andy Temte You know what, Andy? I didn’t ask you before we went on air. Did I pronounce your name right?

Andrew Temte: [00:00:51] You did a good job. Everybody tries to over analyze it. It’s tempting. It’s a it’s of Norwegian background, and it’s just it’s as as you would imagine it. It looks. It sounds

Stone Payton: [00:01:06] All right. Well, we’ll score. That one has a win. All right. So skills out, man. Mission purpose, what are you out there trying to do for folks?

Andrew Temte: [00:01:14] Yeah. Well, I was I was chief executive of of of a large education company, global education company for 22 years. We, you know, we helped individuals achieve their their life’s goals through through education for licensure designations and certifications like the CPA exam or the CFA or Series seven, sixty three, et cetera. And I also served as college president. And, you know, so I’ve got to I had one leg in higher education, another leg in professional education. And you know, we would we would help individuals, you know, achieve those Yahoo moments in their lives. So after 22 years with Kaplan and another kind of eight or 10 before that building a business, you know, wanted to get back out on on quote unquote on my own as it were, were my my my business partner is my, our son, Nicholas. So I have the distinct both opportunity and pleasure of of working with with our son. And we’re we’re just we’re going to we’re going to take all the leadership and, you know, business ideas that that I’ve developed over the last 30 years and we’re packaging them up and and we want to build that next that that next generation of leaders and I want them to learn from all the missteps and all the mistakes that I’ve made so that we can build a better future leader.

Stone Payton: [00:02:55] Well, congratulations on taking that step, man. I got to believe that for some of us, that would be a bit of a challenge because you obviously have a very established career, probably a pretty comfortable situation, but you you had the salt to get out there and go on this new venture. So congratulations. I think that’s fantastic. Yeah. So as I understand it, among some of the focus areas for for you guys in your practice is this I guess one umbrella for some of it might be continuous improvement. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Andrew Temte: [00:03:33] Yeah. As a leader over the last, especially in my time at Kaplan, I have migrated from what you would politely call and Andy said Leader meaning very directive my way or the highway kind of, you know, Hey, everybody, follow me. This is where we’re going. Kind of a leader to one that take. I’ve taken the principles of organizational health and blended them with the principles of continuous improvement or what many think of as as lean, you know, the Toyota management principles from the from the 1980s. So I consider myself a continuous improvement in organizational health leader. And it’s really not any more complicated than continuous improvement is the identification and elimination of waste. It is. The second pillar is respect for your people. And the third pillar is to have a maniacal focus on your customer. And that second pillar of respect for people both externally and internally, that’s what we’ve kind of blown up and attached to organizational health, which is all about creating a foundation of trust and accountability within within your organization, communication, clarity, et cetera. So, you know, I’ve I’ve gone from a very technical leader, a very. My way or the highway leader to one who is very focused on the human element. Your people are your most valuable asset in your. In your business, everybody is is different, everybody’s got a different change curve that they react to as your business changes and grows. So again, it’s about that efficiency, trust, accountability all kind of blended together in this in the special special packaging.

Stone Payton: [00:05:55] I got to tell you, man, as a layperson on on all of these topics, but admittedly it occurs to me, or it would seem to me that it would be far easier, far faster to teach transfer identifying and minimizing waste stuff than it would be to teach and inculcate this idea of respecting your people and the trust. And and that seems like that’s and maybe that’s why we need, you know, the R&D and the Nicklaus’s of the world to help us, because that is a that’s a hard row to hoe. Yeah.

Andrew Temte: [00:06:32] Yeah, you know, they’ve been called soft

Stone Payton: [00:06:34] Skills for

Andrew Temte: [00:06:36] Far too long. Yes, because you have you have hard skills, hard technical skills and then you have the harder. What I like to call human or people skills or behavioral skills. And and yeah, they are much, much harder. You know, everybody, especially as we age, we become more and more hardwired. We’re less mentally agile and flexible. We get set in our ways. And you know, we we learn to put people into certain buckets and categorize them. And, you know, human beings are much, much more complicated than being lumped in to some sort of generational bucket and making all sorts of assumptions about how how they how they might behave. I’m all about having people bringing their whole selves into the world of work, and as business leaders, we’ve just got to stop showing up in what I like to phrase as these emotional suits of armor where we kind of clunk around the office and we’re trying to be somebody who we’re not when it’s a heck of a lot easier to just be who you are and and get the most out of out of your people by, by being yourself.

Stone Payton: [00:07:59] I got to believe this must be. And I don’t mean to suggest that that your work doesn’t have its own set of challenges. I’m sure it does, but it must be incredibly rewarding. Work, man.

Andrew Temte: [00:08:12] Yeah. Look, I you know, I spent years and years, you know, chasing after budgets and and, you know, the the operating income and the top line of the business and, you know, skills owl is going to be, you know, all about, you know, making a profit and having a long term sustainable business. I’m all about cash flow. I’m a finance guy at heart. I got a PhD, earned a PhD in finance from the University of Iowa back in the mid-1990s. So I know all about the functioning of of of the business. But to be able to take a lot of these life’s lessons that I’ve learned and and and create a business model where I’m both giving back and through teaching, coaching, mentoring and hopefully a little bit of inspiration, as the tagline of my book points out, you know, it is. It is extraordinarily rewarding to sit down and write for three hours and have a have a wonderful. What I think is a wonderful idea and you know, and get that out in the wild and see what people think.

Stone Payton: [00:09:24] Well, and I bet it’s also it must be marvelous to work with your son. So do you guys, do you have have you sort of found your grooves in terms of roles like you sort of stay in this lane and Nicholas stays in Atlanta? Or how do you manage manage that?

Andrew Temte: [00:09:41] Yeah. So we’re both musicians. I grew up in a musical family. He obviously grew up in a musical family. And and so I’ve played in bands since I was a teenager. You know, he had a garage band in our garage when when he was younger. So we’re we’re actually writing music together. We’ve we’ve published our first song Late Late Late last year. And so that’s that’s available out on Spotify and YouTube and all the major music services. He’s actually coming into town in a few hours, and we’re going to put the finishing touches on song number two. So, you know, he’s he’s helping me there and then on the on the skills owl side. Of things, you know, he’s got skills that I don’t and I have obviously skills that he doesn’t. So it it is again extraordinarily rewarding to to teach your your son the lessons of business in a way that an MBA program can’t you know? And and just have that. Our other son is, is a doctor and he’s a wonderful man. He’s off off into the world. And I just I can’t thank our our younger son, Nick enough for taking this leap of faith with me. And I hope he’s getting enough as much out of it as as I am.

Stone Payton: [00:11:12] Well, I’m sure that he is, and I’m sure that whether he’s doing it consciously or not, I bet Dad’s learning some lessons from him on all of these topics and all these and all of these domains.

Andrew Temte: [00:11:23] Yeah. You know, the inner the intergenerational aspect is is really cool because and the trust that we have obviously kind of growing up together is I can take a question that’s bothering me about, Hey, will will this audience resonate with this topic? And and I can pose the question to him. And, you know, he’ll come back and say, Look, dad, I think you got to repackage X like this to get the the best result with the kind of twenty five to thirty five year old crowd. Yeah, that you know that clearly you dad as a 58 year old, don’t don’t connect directly to so you know, he he brings that aspect to the table and it’s just so refreshing to, you know, to have have have somebody that I can, you know, in a in a very psychologically safe environment, bounce those ideas off of because when you’ve got employees that you know, that are working, quote unquote for you, I like to think that you’re working with the people in your business instead of people working for you. But you don’t you don’t tend to get all. You don’t tend to get things unvarnished and straight. And that’s what I like about working with with our son is he’s got the we’ve got the relationship, the trust, and he’s going to give it to me straight.

Stone Payton: [00:13:00] All right. So it’s one thing to operate under a logo like Kaplan, it’s another to get out there in the marketplace. Sometimes it can be a little chilly. How’s the whole sales and marketing thing going? Are you still like getting that ironed out?

Andrew Temte: [00:13:15] Or we’re we’re constantly testing testing those waters and some people, some people would say, we’re trying to do too much because we’re testing the waters in the music community right to get this original music out there, which is a challenge in and of itself. But a lot of those lessons from from the music industry translate directly into into business as well. So we’re taking our learnings from a sales and marketing perspective in in in in both directions. But yeah, we’re we’re finding our sea legs. It is not a direct correlation to, oh, I was, you know, I was a big mid-market CEO and knew all these people. And so therefore, I’m going to be a success in a small business. It doesn’t work that way. And you know, the grind is is there and and so, you know, fortunately, we’re we’re doing something that that we love. So we’re not technically working, but we are right and and we’re just we’re iterating. We’re testing, we’re we’re trying to tap into in in the new markets. And I love it because the part of being a continuous improvement individual is that you made a commitment to yourself that you’re always going to be learning, you’re always going to be growing, you’re always going to be pushing that envelope. So I’m not super comfortable right now. I’m testing myself in ways that I haven’t in a long time since I was an entrepreneur back in the 1990s.

Stone Payton: [00:14:57] So let’s talk a little bit about the work and I guess kind of a tactical level. I’m trying to get a bit of a view of early in the engagement because I can’t even imagine where do you start when you’re trying to, you know, achieve this balance between, you know, behavioral and technical skill? Can you just walk us through what a what the early stages of an engagement might look like with you guys?

Andrew Temte: [00:15:22] Well, we are right now. So so I’ve got this book called Balancing Act, which is. Which is a lot of the what and the why around this balance between technical skill and behavioral skill or and frankly, many of the balancing acts that we play in both our personal lives and our and our business lives, and I draw direct connections between the two through the stories that I write. But the next step in that in that journey is to create the workbook, the companion that’s that’s going to go along with it because the book is not the how. And so the workbook is going to be the how, how do I bring these concepts to life within within my business? And I’ve and that’s that’s what we’re working on right now. But I will. Spoiler alert, it all starts with purpose. That is the that is the entry, the gateway into any business planning. Why am I here? Why do we exist and really getting that that that purpose right? So we go we start with purpose. We get into what I call the it of your of your business. And then I’ve got a very special word that I really glommed on to a few years ago. And that’s the concept of indispensability. I know it’s a long, it’s a long word,

Stone Payton: [00:16:53] But don’t try to spell it.

Andrew Temte: [00:16:55] Yeah, but but how do I make myself indispensable to to my customers? How do I make it so difficult for them to go to somebody else because we’re providing such an awesome product or service or or message that that you just you’re not going to think about any anybody else? So we write right, right into indispensability. We talk a lot about culture. Again, that that if you if you think about a plot of trust against accountability, so trust on the vertical axis and accountability on the horizontal, we want to help business leaders move their cultures into that high trust, high accountability box in in that in that for in that four box. And then the workbook is going to finish with what I like to call a management operating system, which is this unique blend of continuous improvement and organizational health and some very specific tools that that that leaders can use with within their businesses to to move their cultures into that high trust, high accountability box.

Stone Payton: [00:18:11] I would think that as a client, certainly IQ more IQ points would be great and I could use a few. But but I wonder, I don’t wonder, I’m pretty convinced that emotional intelligence is probably as important, if not more so and really being able to project yourself into the to the mind of another person or a group and genuinely understand how and why they they think and feel the way they do being able. I would think that that would be an important foundation for a lot of this work.

Andrew Temte: [00:18:45] Yeah, yeah. So I and I’m not I’m not bragging here, but I have been the smartest guy in the room many times in my in my career. But but simultaneously, not the smartest guy in the room because my IQ was leading my IQ. So I was missing all sorts of of signals around the room. I was missing communication opportunities. I was missing clarity, creation opportunities. And so this this concept of the IQ or your emotional intelligence is just at the at the forefront. So again, it’s a balancing act. But balancing that concept of IQ with that of IQ and look, the future world of work is one where we’re going to have computers that can think at low cognitive levels, but ever increasing cognitive levels. Computers are going to be taking more and more of our of of the technical aspects of our jobs. So what do we have to bring to the world of work but our human selves? So it is incumbent on all of us to work on our ex as much as the technical skills that we are curating for viability in the workplace?

Stone Payton: [00:20:07] Now that’s a great way to put it. That’s a that’s a muscle, if you will, that we just need to pay attention to and exercise regularly, isn’t it?

Andrew Temte: [00:20:14] Yeah. And all the all the polarization, you know, we’re not going to going to get political at all here, but we have to recognize that we live in a highly polarized world. You know, getting getting caught in these echo chambers of. Polarization is not healthy for your IQ, so if you want, you know, if if a listener is out there and you want to work on your IQ, get your news from multiple sources. Get out of those. Get out of those Echo Echo chambers. Listen to other perspectives and other opinions because that’s that is the way forward to curating a much stronger IQ that you know that your opinion, your way of thinking is not the only one. That’s what IQ is all about. So polarization works directly against building a strong IQ.

Stone Payton: [00:21:11] So I was approaching this conversation, at least initially as well. I mean, I’m I owned 40 percent of a media firm and I have a smaller, you know, entity that does some other stuff. I was approaching it from the business owner, the leader, the manager. But now, based on what you’re saying, I’m thinking that there probably are some things and there are some that people who who go to work for these organizations can and should be doing to it. Maybe all the way, all the way back to how they prepare to be effective in the workforce. And I think maybe that’s changing some, don’t you? It’s not all about necessarily just go get you a four year degree and and start shopping it. Is it

Andrew Temte: [00:21:57] Right? Yeah. And when we could literally talk for another hour about what what World Economic Forum has categorized as the reskilling revolution? And if I can leave your listeners with one thing that they remember from this conversation is that learning never stops and that becoming a true lifelong learner, not just opening up the Wall Street Journal and perusing the New York Times, but really engaging in challenging yourself and adopting and acquiring new skills to maintain and grow your viability in the world of work. That is that that is the, I would argue, the obligation of the future workforce participant because you are going to be left in the dust as a contributor to this society. If you don’t adopt that open, that open mind, that agile mind, that growth mindset, that lifelong learning mindset. So learning is not done after high school, it’s not done after college. And frankly, the four year degree is it’s cool and all. But there are things that I call skill portfolios that are going to be alternative pathways into the world of work that are going to be equally as viable as degree because degrees are far too expensive. It’s frankly a fairly elitist model and and we’re leaving a lot of people behind in our economy and in our society that can be wonderful contributors to to to your to your business. So as a so as an individual, you have an obligation to be a lifelong learner. As a business leader, you have an obligation to be a teacher, a coach and to put learning at the forefront of your business model.

Stone Payton: [00:23:58] Yeah. So you make me think of. Now let’s talk. You know, it’s my show, so let’s talk about me for a minute. Now you make me think of my youngest, Kelly. She does have a degree, but I think she’s really has sort of begun to build out this skill portfolio. She has a patchwork of skill sets and experiences that make her incredibly valuable. It gives some depth and texture. You know what she brings to the table now? That’s partially why she fired me before Thanksgiving and got a bigger job with more pay. She was working with me, but no, that’s the way Kelly has approached this thing, right? She’s built out that, that that skill portfolio. The other thing that I’m thinking is as I as we continue to build here at Business RadioX, you know it. In the past I have had I have fallen into the trap. I think of sort of hiring in my own image. You know, if a good old boy or you know or southern gal comes in and she’s pretty smart and she. But but we just we always think too much alike. Right. And it would be good to get some very different perspective, you know, like what some of what you said you were enjoying with Nick? Right? Like, you get that different perspective.

Andrew Temte: [00:25:20] Yeah. You know, diversity, equity and inclusion is is a very hot phrase. But yeah, that that. All concept, it needs to be extended into equity within your within your workplace, meaning incentive systems and and and especially that of providing learning opportunities. This whole concept of the the high the the high potential within your business is the one that gets the learning opportunities that that that that that’s that’s not that’s not a great approach. You need to provide learning opportunities with equity. You need diversity of thought and opinion within your business because you’ve got to have those people who are saying, No, no, no, no, no, I, that that’s a false narrative that you’re trying to try. That’s a that’s not the right way to approach this. I would approach it this way. And so then you have constructive conflict within the business, and conflict handled correctly can be a very good thing for your company. So I have I have made the mistake like like you just admitted that I’ve hired people that look too much like me. They think too much like me. And so I get in these echo chambers and it it’s all our things are going really, really well. That’s that’s awesome. And then all of a sudden, you didn’t think of this. You didn’t think of that. The business and the business model fails because you didn’t have a rich enough set of of humans around you to really challenge your thinking and and get a better result.

Stone Payton: [00:27:07] Before we wrap, I want to go back to this book balancing act. Is that that’s the title? Yeah. So what was that? Was that difficult to come together for you? Did it come together pretty easy? Tell us a little bit about the experience of authoring that thing.

Andrew Temte: [00:27:21] Yeah. Well, I started writing stories back in twenty seventeen and I would I would, you know, something would happen at work. And as part of my communication and my my teaching to the to the to the rest of the employment community, I would take that concept. Then I would write a small article about it and I would interject a personal story and I would post it both internally and externally. And then we’d have a conversation about it, either with the senior team or or with with a broader team. And as I kept building this library of of of stories, it dawned on me, Wow, I can turn this into a book. And the book was originally going to, you know, be called stories of mid-level senior executives. Because I’ve there, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of us, but you’re not quite the guy or gal at the top, but you’re also fairly senior in the organization. So you’re managing from the middle. So you’re managing up, you’re managing down and you’re managing on both sides. And and so that that was going to be the structure of the book. But the more I wrote, the more the concept of balance really started to become the theme. And it was it was in the spring of 2020, as the pandemic hit that I thought, OK, I’m going to be spending a lot of time at home. Let’s get this book done. And and we were and we we cranked through it. And it was it was it was a wonderful experience. But we, you know, we took all these stories. We laid them out on the floor and said, OK, how does this all fit together? And then we filled in all the blanks, and by April 2021, we had a finished product and it’s it’s out the door.

Stone Payton: [00:29:14] What a great foundation piece resource for people who are participating in your work to write your clients. It must be that that must add a lot to that, that whole client experience being able to go back to that material.

Andrew Temte: [00:29:30] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it forms that foundation.

Stone Payton: [00:29:33] I’ll bet. All right. I want you to hang out with us after we go off air just so you and I can chat for for a moment. But before we wrap, I want to make sure that our listeners have whatever are appropriate points of contact. I wanted to be able to have a chance to to reach out and if they won’t have a conversation with you or Nick or anybody else on your team, and I don’t want to leave without finding out where we can hear that song to. So lay it on this man.

Andrew Temte: [00:30:00] Yeah, well, everything is available at Andrew. So Andrew, VMT, please don’t put a p in my name. One does not exist. Everybody wants to put a p in there. So Andrew temped is the website. You can find me on LinkedIn. We’re we’re on Facebook. The band’s name is called The Remainders, and we’ve been together for almost 18 years. Primarily classic rock, little modern rock, and now we’re and now we’re doing originals. We focus on philanthropy and giving back to the community. So fun philanthropic midlife crisis is the is the band, but but that’s that’s where you can find us.

Stone Payton: [00:30:47] Well, and it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Thanks so much for hanging out with us and visiting Mahal.

Andrew Temte: [00:30:56] Thank you.

Stone Payton: [00:30:58] All right, this is Stone Payton for our guests today, Andy temped and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying, We’ll see you next time on workplace wisdom.