The ABCs to Outstanding: Joey Havens Discusses Effective Leadership

Show Notes

Carl Lewis:

Welcome to The Connected Enterprise podcast. I’m Carl Lewis, your host from Vision33, and my guest is Joey Havens. Joey, welcome to the podcast. Please tell us about yourself, your background, and your new book.

Joey Havens:

Thank you, Carl. It’s a pleasure. I wrote the soon-to-be-released book Leading With Significance. I'm a CPA and partner at a top 25 accounting firm—HORNE, LLP. I served as managing partner from 2012 to 2021; now, I'm doing executive coaching, leadership development, strategic planning, and some business development, still as a partner. I’m retiring next year. People ask me why I wrote a book before I retired instead of after, and it was because I felt God calling me to write the book. It was my next big challenge.

My purpose is to inspire more leaders to trust the good in people and serve and care for them in intentional ways that lead to full potential and high performance. I'm excited. It'll be available on June 6th. You can pre-order it on Amazon now, and it'll be available on Amazon in Kindle and a voice edition.

Carl Lewis:

Sounds great. My mentor, Boris Cook, was a CPA. He taught me pretty much everything I know about accounting because I wasn’t an accountant—I was a theologian. So, he was helpful as I moved into the consultant world. He taught me about what he called the language of business.

Joey, you say your leadership style is making other people successful. What brought about that mission?

Joey Havens:

It partly goes back to my faith, but I’ve always felt a calling to help others realize their full potential. That's where I get my joy. It came from feedback I got when I was younger. As a young professional, I was too competitive, and people would say, “Joey is out for Joey.” That truth helped me reflect on my leadership style. I thought, “What should my journey be about?” And I get joy out of helping others realize their full potential.

Carl Lewis:

I remember a fellow named Dick Colenzo taking me to lunch. I was young and full of myself. He told me everybody was on my side and wishing the best for me—and I’d do myself a lot of favors if I stopped talking about it and did it.

Joey Havens:

That’s great advice. We need truth-tellers.

Carl Lewis:

We do. And his style was calm enough that I could hear it. I left that lunch thinking, “I could do something with this, or I could ignore it.” Sometimes listening to those voices is critical.

You also like volunteer work, and you've done a lot to give back to others, right? Did that come from the same feedback?

Joey Havens:

At my core, I believe that when we’ve been blessed in an abundance of ways and we’re generous and give back, it comes back to us more. As part of my faith, God calls us to serve and give back to others. Some of the greatest joys in life were when I was giving back, whether it was money, time, or wisdom.

Carl Lewis:

I understand that completely. Tell me about your ABCs of leadership, please.

Joey Havens:

The ABCs of leadership also came from feedback. It's part of my mission to help others realize their full potential. I identified three things that separated outstanding performers from average performers. My first evaluation out of college was a defining moment. I expected to be told how terrific I was again, but I was just average in five or six categories and needed improvement in two others. That set me back on my butt, but it was exactly what I needed. I didn’t want to be average. I didn't want to be typical. That was the beginning.

The A is ‘attitude.’ It's one of the greatest indicators of our success. We control our attitudes. I encourage people not to give control of their attitude away. The B is ‘better focus.’ Focus is powerful in everything we do. When we're focused, we're at our best. I teach that you need to understand when your high-energy times are. Then schedule the things you need to be focused on, your highest priorities, during your high energy times. It's a discipline. The difference between average performance and outstanding performance is a discipline to focus even for small intervals because we can cut how long it takes to do something in half—and have a higher-quality product. I say ‘better focus’ because people think they're focused, but we can improve.

The C is ‘constant learning.’ We live in an exponential world. I didn't realize 20 years ago when I put this together how relevant the C would be. Today we must learn, unlearn, and relearn because of all the change around us. People who will be outstanding and progress in their careers will be lifelong learners.

Those are my ABCs to outstanding. They’re easy to do, and they’re easy not to do. And that's why the average person doesn't do them.

Carl Lewis:

You talk about better focus. My best time of day is 10:00 am-2:00 pm. Earlier than that, I'm getting warmed up, and at 3:00 pm, I need a good cup of coffee. It's been that way for a long time. Goes back to my tennis playing days. I hated early morning matches, and I hated evening matches. I didn’t play well. I like it when it's hot outside and the sun is over me. Same for golf. Those are my focus hours when I focus.

Joey Havens:

I can relate to that 3:00 pm coffee.

Carl Lewis:

Joey, you talk about your faith and what a motivator it's been. What part has faith played in developing your philosophy and creating the people-first culture in your organization?

Joey Havens:

Faith has played a large role, but mostly indirectly. It’s the Christian values of serving and caring for others that I believe in. That's what makes a difference in the workplace. When leaders connect with people, when they demonstrate how they care, when they serve their team—that's when the magic happens. The most unhappy people I've met have been focused on themselves and pleasure. God calls us to be something bigger than ourselves. So indirectly, faith has played a role, but my internal needle kept pointing to people or the difference-maker.

My faith also gave me the courage to try different things even though there's no direct relationship between ‘people first and growth’ or ‘people first and profitability.’ I had enough courage. Our leadership team had enough faith and courage that we believed if we put people first, we would get growth and profitability—and we did.

Carl Lewis:

You mentioned ‘servant leadership’ in your blog. We hear about it all the time—servant leader, servant leadership—but what does it mean?

Joey Havens:

I want to be general with this question because I think that term is overused, and people have too many definitions of it. I would say leadership, period. Any leader who expects to succeed, to influence people, to lead anyone or any team, will discover they must prioritize people above growth and profitability. They'll get growth and profitability, but people must come first.

So, leadership is about putting others first. It's about putting the team first, and maybe that's servant leadership. I believe it's leadership at its core that the further you go up in leadership, the more people you serve. And effective leadership—leadership that has influence—starts with magnetic energy that comes from connecting, believing in, and serving your team.

Carl Lewis:

The one thing I know is when you see or experience it, you know what it is. It's tangible at that moment. Otherwise, it's very theoretical.

Joey Havens:

That’s a great way of saying it. When you see, feel, or experience servant leadership, you know it.

Carl Lewis:

Joey, crazy things are happening in the job market, like tremendous resignation rates. I heard the phrase ‘quiet quitting.’ I read an article about rage applying where people who are dissatisfied with their current jobs apply for about 250 jobs at once, in a fit of ‘I have to get out of here.’

Joey Havens:

It's real rage, isn't it?

Carl Lewis:

It's real rage. Employers are working harder than ever to hang on to folks because they invest so much in training people and they're valuable to the company—and then they move on. I think it's harder than ever to hire interns because you invest so much, and they instantly leverage that to move on to someplace else. Employees are looking for the perfect place, I guess. What would you tell companies about holding on to people and employees about looking for the perfect place?

Joey Havens:

That's a deep question. I’ll start with the easy part, which is what I’d tell everybody about looking for the perfect place. There are no perfect companies or perfect cultures. When we look for perfection and hold ourselves to that standard, we'll be disappointed because every company/culture is made up of humans, and humans make mistakes. You want to look for organizations intentionally demonstrating that leadership cares about the people and that people are their top priority. There’s transparency: They know where they are, they're trying to improve, and they're sharing how they're trying to improve and their progress. That transparency builds trust. And that’s the type of team people want. They want a strong sense of belonging and that people are working on building something bigger than themselves.

They're looking for autonomy. And people—leaders especially—cringe when I use the word autonomy, but flexibility is all about the autonomy for me to have input into how, when, and where I work, understand my role and responsibilities, and integrate my career and my personal life. That's the autonomy people want. Not that they’ll get the perfect schedule, but they have input into it. Not to avoid conflicts or problems, but to work through them better.

A strong sense of belonging and autonomy are the two things I encourage leaders to think about as they connect to their team and start to build trust.

Carl Lewis:

So, on the people side, you think companies need to foster those things for people to build a long-term team?

Joey Havens:

It's everything from the communication and the messaging from leadership, but I'm a big advocate of ‘seeing is believing.’ And many people feel like with their culture, if they hang up a certain banner, if they say, “We do this” or “We do that,” people watch what happens. They watch what behaviors are allowed. What gets a lot of cultures is what behaviors they tolerate. Seeing is believing, and your culture is what actually happens and what people experience.

Carl Lewis:

Absolutely. It seems like that may be harder to do now than before. For example, I think we always wanted autonomy, but we were together more often and didn’t have the level we’re looking for today. For some of us who are a little older, it's harder for us to incorporate that concept of autonomy into our thinking because we're used to a rigid in at 8:00 and out at 5:00.

My career was never like that. Yeah, that was a given, but there was more I was in control of myself. At times, I was accused of not reeling it in well enough. Maybe those of us with children have influenced them to where they don't want that, and they're searching for something more.

I read your blog about wearing the right uniform. Can you share that concept with everybody?

Joey Havens:

I was trying to help people understand that cultures come with their own behaviors and reward systems. They send messages about what it takes to succeed in them. And as a new team member, especially, people are looking at that—what are people doing here to succeed? What are they celebrating? What are they talking about? Which behaviors are being promoted? What are the behaviors of those getting promotions? That's the big telling factor.

People form uniforms in their minds: When I go to work at this place, I need to look like this. I used a company where the message was, “If you want to succeed here, you need to have on the uniform of 24/7. We’ll celebrate who sent the latest email. We’ll celebrate who sets up the conference call on Saturday at 7:00 am.” That was the uniform management was rewarding. It's not a uniform I want to wear. I'm not a 24/7 person—I'm a work hard, play hard person, and I want autonomy to do both of those. But that's what I mean by uniforms. Culture tells people what it takes to succeed, and people start wearing that uniform.

Carl Lewis:

I think it's a real challenge for the leadership of any company to be introspective enough to ask themselves, “What uniform are we asking people to wear?” And “What are we rewarding? Who's getting the promotions? What does that say to everyone else on our team?” Because if you're frustrated with the churn, the turnover might be a good time to ask those questions, right? Because that's probably part of why that's happening.

Joey Havens:

Great insights. And in my book about the leadership journey, the first—and maybe hardest—step is having the courage to embrace the brutal reality of where your culture is today. Because regardless of how good you think it is, it has areas that stink. It has areas where people aren’t getting consistent experiences. And you can't start until you embrace where you are.

Carl Lewis:

In the consulting business, an awful lot is driven by billable hours. And sometimes, the billable hours concept and doing the right thing come into conflict. Empowering people to do the right thing more than bill the hour is sometimes tricky. But I think it has great rewards. I've watched my company change through the years as we've emphasized the customer experience more.

Our culture has changed over the last decade because we embrace some of that thinking at all levels. It’s made us better and made the working environment better. But the only reward isn’t to the guy who generates the most billable hours along the way.

Joey Havens:

You have to be careful what you measure. I could go into a long discussion about all the wrong things that measure in billable hours in the consulting or CPA business. How counterproductive is that to client experience or what's best for the client, what's best for your team members? It's just not a good measure.

Carl Lewis:

I'm aware of many companies because of the podcast and friends in the industry, and that concept is very dug in many industries. That industry also has about 20% turnover every year. So, a little piece of free introspection: That may be part of it.

Well, Joey, I wish you all the success with the book and your upcoming endeavors. Thanks for joining us.

Joey Havens:

Carl, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

Carl Lewis:

You're welcome. And to our listeners—until we meet again, stay connected.