210 - Decoding the Dynamics of Decision-Making in Nonprofit Board Meetings with Integrated Growth Advisors' Daniel McMahon

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Ian McBayne, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and managing partner of a company called Integrated Growth Advisors, which can be found at integratedgrowthadvisors.com. Like me, you started out professionally. You were a CPA. I was a lawyer and kind of switched gears in the middle of your career. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me.

I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Doug.

Absolutely. Let's start off with a quick backstory, Reader's Digest version. Started, started off as a CPA, rose into big accounting, did it all, and then decided—

a lot of people think that, by the way, they decide that as a side note. An article just came out on Fortune magazine. The United States is lacking 340,000 accountants, by the way. I don't know, you know, accounting is based on how many hours in the day. I don't know how we're going to make up those hours as a profession. But going back to your question, I, I worked really hard in my career as a CPA. I enjoyed it. I was always a hard worker. And my mother always used to say, Dan, you're very observant. And I don't know how this happened. I didn't plan it out, but somehow I ended up becoming an auditor. So as a CPA, I was an auditor. I got to see a lot of different things, a lot of different leadership styles, a lot of different governance infrastructures in practice, and a lot of accounting systems and businesses throughout a 20-year career. Back on December 1st, 2011, I was— November 30th, 2011, I was a partner with an accounting firm, a $30 million revenue accounting firm based in New England. And the next day, December 1st, 2011, we merged into an international firm. And at the time, I just, I wasn't crazy about going through that type of a transaction. I had, I had enjoyed my time with the $30 million firm. Going from a $30 million firm to a billion-dollar firm, very different experience. I had the skill sets, but I didn't really have the drive to, to go and try and perform at the partner level at that firm. I was a partner at the $30 million firm. So on December 1st of '11, I was able to have the fortunate opportunity to start Integrated Growth Advisors, and our focus at the time And we're still core to the message, but our focus at the time was to help business owners, particularly accounting firms back in those days, grow and do it through structure and process and stronger leadership. I had worked in a handful of accounting firms and accountants aren't always people, people, people, as you can imagine. So I saw a lot of command and control throughout my career in terms of leadership styles.. And that didn't really resonate with me as a, a person receiving the orders. And I'm probably not different than a lot of people, especially in this day and age where, where information is at our fingertips. Uh, it's difficult to just fall in line and, and fall under a command and control system. So I had set out to find ways for my clients to become exceptional leaders and have strong governance infrastructures that actually are systems that go to work for their firms to help drive the results they're looking for. And I've been doing this now for 12 years. We work with accounting firms, professional services firms, and any type of a privately held business, owner-operated business.

So you're providing, you're providing what, leadership development, management consultant, systems, systems analysis, that sort of stuff?

Yeah, I wouldn't classify us as a leadership development firm in the, in the context of maybe what a human resources expert would do, right? But I do provide emerging leadership coaching And we've developed a model around it. And then when it comes to the work that we generally do with our clients, it's management consulting, it's business advisory services. And then we've got, we've got a mergers and acquisitions function for accounting firms only. And then we have an executive recruiting function that crosses all industries. We've recruited anywhere from an electrician a master electrician up to a CFO, up to a partner in an accounting firm. So we've done a lot with executive recruiting as well.

So you've been doing this for a while. What is it that gets you up in the morning these days and motivates you to go to work?

That's a good question. I think for me, it's all about building something. And when I was practicing as a CPA and as an accountant in public accounting, I always liked to get my hands dirty in the clients that required maybe a turnaround situation. We might, you know, we might have had a client that we billed $100,000 a year for the work we were doing. But when you looked at our time records, we were incurring $200,000 of time. Wow. So I would get in there and I would try and work with the client and set up, lines of communication and, and try to get them to understand how it was that we worked and how I, as at the time a manager or a partner in the firm, was evaluated. And I was able to get, uh, results, uh, and, and turn those relationships around. So for, for me, that was like the earliest point in my career where I realized I really like to build things. So with Integrated Growth Advisors, I started off in a walk-in closet that was big enough to hold a desk with my dog and my cat.

Right.

And December 1st, 2011, that's where I went, 8:00 AM. And by January 1st, 2011, of course it was a holiday. Let's say January 2nd, 2012, the dog and cat were waiting for me at the door at 8 o'clock. So I just went to work and started building this business. That's what really gets me going.

And, and so it sounds like you've got a fairly broad client base. What's a typical day look like for you?

Each day of the week is different. I try to, I try to spend Monday working on my business, which, you know, there's the adage, you know, work on your business as opposed to in your business. And the work that we do as consultants, we're helping the clients work on their business. So I try to set aside Monday to work on our business. So I have meetings with the people that I work with internally, occasionally take a call outside the organization on a Monday, but that's what my Monday looks like. Tuesday through Thursday, I'll settle into a series of calls. Some days I'm back to back to back and, you know, 7, 8 hours goes by and I haven't moved from my desk.

I know how that is. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, always learning something new, always interacting with somebody. On an issue that they're having that sometimes I've incurred in my career and sometimes I haven't. So I just try to get them focused on their objectives.

What is it in your work that gives you the most satisfaction?

I'd say helping people, helping them through, help them, help them see through the issues that they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. I like to try and help my clients get up out of the weeds and see their business from maybe a 10,000 or 20,000-foot level and try to help them prioritize what's most important. And, you know, a lot of this I, I have a, a keen understanding of because I've gone through it myself. I've gone through it in my own business. I went through it in my public accounting career where I had all sorts of things coming at me at any given moment of the day, and I needed to figure out how to prioritize and tackle what was most important at that given point in time. So that's what I do. I help them get out of the weeds and get moving.

We were talking before we came on the show and I learned that you are, you're pretty much remote, aren't you? It's a remote company, your firm.

We're remote with the exception, we're on site when we need to be.

Right.

One of the things that we do offer is strategic retreat services.

Mm-hmm.

So that's where we'll go actually to an offsite location. They'll come to an offsite location, put their cell phones aside, and we focus. We do day and a half retreats. I've done as much as 2.5-day retreats, and that's when we're live in person. And occasionally we do visit our clients when, when necessary.

So, so you've got people all over the United States. How do you, how do you manage the remote, the remote, the remote team?

Well, through as much communication as I can possibly afford in terms of time. I've got, I've got somebody in each time zone pretty much in the United States and either, either a client or a person that works with my, my firm. So I, I keep standing appointments on my calendar and I try to be as communicative as possible. It's not always that easy. With the way my schedule goes, but, uh, that's the best thing I can do. I've got a group of people who have, let's say, been to see the wizard. They've achieved great things in their careers and they're at a point now where they're semi-retired and they want to continue to provide great services to people that have needs that they can help. So It's a little bit different than driving a team like back in my days when I was a partner in an accounting firm.

You've got people who are accomplished, don't need a lot of direction, enjoy the community of working together and can kind of share a vision of how to serve people, how to serve clients. Yes.

Yes. And I would say that that might be the biggest challenge that I have and we have is we all come from somewhat similar backgrounds. We, we've all come from an accounting and finance or a management consulting background, but everybody looks at the world a little bit differently or sometimes drastically differently. So trying to get everybody on the same page to start, at least to start from the starting line with a client is, is the most important thing that I, that I try to do. So So that's a challenge that I have. But I work with a great group of people.

What is it, Dan, that you think is unique about you that you bring to the table that's made this business successful?

I'm going to speak from a position of humility. I think I've, I've, I've failed a lot in my career. I've made a lot of mistakes. I've, I've tried things. I've taken risks. You know, it could be any number of things that maybe I was confronted with as a manager coming up the ranks or a leader. And I've sat in their seat before. So, you know, I've been faced with the decisions that they're making. I've been faced with the challenge that they have. And for better or worse, I've worked my way through it. So My, my view is if, if I had something that maybe I fell a little bit short on and I can see it from the bigger perspective of learning, I'm able to bring that to my clients.

So, so it sounds like it's experience, a lot of experience, and not just experience but reflected experience where you've been reflective about what you've done right, what you've done wrong. I know in our Authority Magazine interview you were talking about how you were looking at leadership and in a very reflective way. In fact, we should even talk about that. You, you, you said that when you were coming up through the ranks, you would look at leaders and think about, where's this taking us? How's this style going to get us to where we want to go? What's this leader— what— how does this leader— how is this leadership function going to hurt or help? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, you know, I think, uh, when somebody's leading a team and somebody's maybe up in front of a group of 200 people, it's real easy to be a fly on the wall and evaluate that person. So, so clearly the person that I was observing and evaluating from my seat was more somebody who was really, you know, in there doing it, making things happen. But I was always observing what, what decisions they were making, how they were going about doing it, how they were linking what they were trying to accomplish with what it was they were asking the team to do. So a lot of times I would find that there was no linkage. And sometimes my clients, when I get involved with with a client that's going through a lot of chaos, they get into this situation where they suffer from a let's just do that syndrome. So you get a group of people around the table. There's a lot of firestorm going on in the organization. They're behind closed doors. They're the senior leadership. And they haven't paused. They haven't paused to reflect themselves. They haven't paused to reflect. They don't have normal board meetings, let's say, or they haven't stepped away for an offsite retreat on an annual basis. And they're in the weeds, they're in the fire, and they kick an idea around the table. And the leader at the head of the table says, let's just do that. And then they're off and running. They come out of there.

Recipe for disaster.

It is. It certainly is. Because, you know, where does the path to nowhere lead you? I, you know, it's maybe cliché, but you've got to have strategic direction. You've got to have an understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. And I didn't learn that until later in my career, personally. So again, from a humility perspective, I made these mistakes myself.

The other thing I'll say about that is that I teach decision-making under stress and uncertainty at the graduate level. And what I, among other things, I teach my students, there's no such thing as a rational decision. But I said the mo— you cannot, you can never control the outcome of the decision. All you can control is the, is the decisional process itself. And so you wanna make sure that your decision process is rock solid. And so, Thinking about a senior leadership team in the middle of a firestorm sitting in closed doors saying, let's do that, means no decisional process is in place, which is going to guarantee a bad outcome.

Yeah. And I look at it as leading from behind.

Yep.

I've thought a lot about that in my career. And you made a point that we talked about how I've been reflective in my career. Each time I had a tough failure, or each time I helped a client through a tough situation, I would reflect and I would write it down and I would try to create a model or create some, some bullet point list that I can reference in the future. And at this point, we've got a pretty significant selection of intellectual property that goes along with the work that we do because we've seen a lot of these things.

Right.

And the concept of leading from behind as opposed to leading from the front, if I can just spell that out from my perspective, I think about it as, you know, leading from the front. You know, you're at the tip of the sword. And I'm from the north. I'm from Chicago originally and spent a lot of time in New England, a lot of snow. So we see a lot of snowplows coming through the highways.. And the ones that hit the highways have points on the front of their, their shovels and all that snow, the snowplow just goes right on through. So I think about that. I equate to that snow that gets thrown off as white noise, unnecessary stuff, things that the leader doesn't need to focus on. And the way that I came upon that is because I started thinking about What if, what if you're leading from behind? You're, you're the inverse version of that snowplow, and you're not going to get anywhere, right? You're going to go about 10 feet before even the strength of a snowplow is going to be stopped.

Exactly. Huh, that's a great, that's a great metaphor to think about. The other thing that, that strikes me as being really important is the importance of listening. The show is called Listening with Leaders because I believe listening is sort of the foundational— it is the foundational skill of life. And interestingly, listening is not something that we learn to do. Listening is something that we're ordered to do as children. So we never really learn how to listen. We're told to listen. We're told to keep our mouths shut. But we're really never taught the actual skill of listening. And some people pick it up and some people don't. What's been your— what's your observation about all of that?

I agree that as we're young, we're told to listen, we're told to sit there and pay attention, you know, zip it, you know, keep your mouth shut and pay attention. I think, and what I'm intrigued by the work that you do and the fact that your, your podcast is called Listening with Leaders is that listening is probably the most important thing that, that any of us can do, especially in a leadership situation. You've got to read the room. You've got to be able to pay attention and listen to the feedback that's coming to you. Sometimes it's just body language feedback. Other times it's somebody, you know, pulling you aside and telling you what they see, but you've got to be a great listener. I learned, I actually learned to be a better listener, and I learned it after my public accounting career. When I started Integrated Growth Advisors, I had spent all of my winters for 20 winters working a lot of hours, not seeing the light of day. Of course, the days are shorter, but I still worked pretty late hours. And when I came out of that, that rat race or that treadmill and I started this business, I didn't have anything to do on Saturdays and Sundays from January to April. And it was really a strange feeling. I didn't know what to do with myself. So, so I learned certain things and I would always take something on and something from a learning perspective. One year I decided I'm going to learn improv. And it was through the art form of improv that I learned how to listen.

Good.

And I failed a lot in those first classes, but I went through several classes of improv. And you have to listen to be able to help your partner when you're on stage. So I did learn to be a better listener later in life, and it, it makes a lot of difference.

It does. I, I, like you, didn't really learn how to listen until I left the pro— it's strange, as a trial lawyer, you know, I, I knew how to listen, but only listen for very specific things for a very specific purpose, uh, which has its advantages and its major disadvantages. I didn't really learn to listen until I left the practice of law and became a mediator and a peacemaker. But one of the things that I've seen is that, especially in business, leaders have a hard time listening because they can't manage their own anxiety. And so they become anxious about what they're hearing, and as soon as they become anxious, their brain shut down and they can't process information anymore. So the one of the, one of the big secrets I think to learning how to listen, especially in intense situations, to your point, reading a room, is learning how to manage your own anxiety so that you are not hijacked by other people's upset. I think that's, there, there's a lot there and that's what I teach people to do, how to, how to not allow emotions to hijack you. How do you manage all that? And I think because otherwise, I mean, we've all seen it, right? You're— somebody's talking and you're not listening to them. What are you doing? You're thinking about, what am I going to say next? How am I going to rebut that? What, you know, how do I need to be heard? What am I going to do?

That's right. Yeah.

And, and so it's never listening. It's always one person talking and another person talking and very little communication going on. In between. And I see this all the time, and that's what leads to a lot of dysfunction, especially in teams, I think, is that they just don't know how to— they just don't know how to listen to each other. And if with a— if they could just master a couple of really simple skills, all that changes. I think that's— I think that's the secret. And I love that you did improv. You— I play jazz violin, and guess what? When you're improvising over chord changes or over a tune, guess what you got to do? You gotta listen.

Gotta listen.

You gotta hear the changes.

You got to get into a cadence.

That's right. You got to stay in the groove. You got to be in the groove. That's the most important thing, be in the groove. You can do one note improvisations, as long as you're in the groove, you're good. And then, you know, you're listening to what's going on in the music. Chord changes, what's the bass player doing, what's the drummer doing, what's the keyboard guy doing? What's the guitar guy doing? And you're listening to all of that, and you've got to meld into that. And the only way you do that is by deep listening. Same thing in improv. In fact, I think all leaders should take— either take jazz improvisation classes or improv courses, the type you're talking about. It's such a huge learning tool.

It's the best thing I ever did. And I believe it, you know, I presume my parents would be proud that I graduated college, that I got my CPA. I ran the Chicago Marathon many pounds ago, but the best thing I ever did was study improv.

So when you go into, when you go in and work with clients, do you talk about this stuff at all?

Yeah, all the time. I reference it. Sometimes I recommend it. Oftentimes I'll go into a client situation. Of course, I don't know what I'm going to be confronted with.

Right.

And it's improv. It's improv. And, you know, my wife is a schoolteacher and she says every day in the classroom is improv.

Right.

So we all deal with it and we're all confronted with circumstances that we don't anticipate. And your comment about anxiety is really an interesting one because the threshold for failure. If you're in a leadership position in a large corporation or a company that you own and you put your whole life into, there's a lot on the line, right? And you can really easily get just stuck in that moment.

Yeah, I mean, becoming self-aware enough to know that when you're anxious— I mean, we all become, we all become anxious, it's part of what the human experience, but the It's not the anxiety that's bad, it's, it's what we do with it. And if we're completely unaware of it, then it can cause real problems. Once we become aware of what, what, what is the experience of anxiety, then we can learn tools. And I'm not talking about meditation or walking or deep breaths or stuff like that. There are much better tools for dealing with that kind of problem that work much faster and more efficiently than what a lot of people talk about. But I, I, I think that's a big problem. And I mean, I see it, I see it at all levels. I see it in parenting, I see it in relationships, I see it in business relationships where anxiety is the underlying drive of all conflict and all disruption and dysfunction. And so the trick, trick is learning how to manage all of that, make it happen.

I just saw this happen last week. I, I, if I can share a quick story.

Of course.

I attended a nonprofit board meeting for the first time. I had never been to this board meeting before. I'm getting more involved with the organization and the chairman of the board, chairperson sitting at the head of the table, really wanted to get something done that was important to the chairperson. So to the person to her left, said, would you make a motion about this? I don't have any problem with that. Okay. But she was at this level where she really leading up to this meeting must have been thinking, I've got to find a way to get this passed because it's going to be so great for our organization. We're going to do great things with it all from her perspective. So in, in the, in the Robert's Rules of Order, You do a motion, second, discussion, all in favor, take a vote, call the question, right?

Yeah.

And you've got to go— and, and by the way, now my 30-plus year career, I never really realized how important Robert's Rules was until this moment last week. So person made a motion, somebody quickly seconded it. And she says, all in favor? Half the room just— they didn't care, rubber stamp it, let's get moving. And then a couple people like, well, wait a minute, I've got a question about this. And she says, well, we're putting it to a vote. And I think she had one of those anxiety moments, right? And everybody hastily voted on it, and there was no discussion, and there was a lot of dissent. That dissent might not have been there if we had taken the time to digest it and discuss it.

There's a reason for these rules and these processes. That's another form of decisional processing that has withstood the test of time. Hundreds of years. Hundreds of years. And it works. It's used because it works. And you can do Roberts Rules very formally. You know, the book is pretty thick, the rules, right? Or you can do it very informally, but you describe the very— the simplest version: motion, second, discussion, call the question. And that— and what it does is it keeps an orderly process that allows all voices to be heard and allows for deliberative process to occur in a governing body. And if you don't do that you're gonna— you're not controlling a good decisional outcome, a good decisional process, which is going to lead to a poor outcome. The outcome not being the vote itself, but being a rupture of the relationships of the group.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and should the, the initiative go forward and fail, you've got people in the room that wanted to speak up and they didn't have the official chance to, and it causes political factions to form, and people leave the board, and the board gets a bad reputation because the chair is a bully or an incompetent.

And that, that really sullies the reputation. Word gets around, especially in, in smaller communities or in larger communities with bigger boards. People are aware and they don't even think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And here I was researching the earliest stages of Robert's Rules this far into my career and this far into my career of being an advisor to businesses about making decisions. And I learned something.

Yeah. Well, that's the cool thing about the work you do and what I do, you know, every engagement's a new learning opportunity and that's what makes it fun. All right, one more question, I'll let you go, Dan. What's one thing about you— you've said a couple of things about yourself that I thought were pretty interesting— what's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I already burned the running a marathon.

I love that one. And couple, couple of pounds later.

Yeah, several pounds ago. Yeah, one thing about me that you might not otherwise know Well, I, I actually did a triathlon.

Wow.

And swam out into Lake Michigan with people swimming over me. It was unbelievable. But I swam out to it, what I saw from shore to be a buoy like this, like a, like a ball out on the horizon. And when I got out there, it took me about 10 seconds just to swim around the thing. It was so big.

Wow.

So that was another accomplishment in my, my life that I'm proud of. None more proud than than having gone through all the improv work that I've done and survived in business for 12+ years.

Here you go. Well, this has been a really fun conversation. So much— thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to chat with us.

Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would you know, would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.