361 - Embracing Technology Without Losing the Human Touch in Leadership with Chip Higgins

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 The foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes.

So let's get started. Chia Piggins, welcome to Listening with Leaders. I've read a lot about your background, really interesting, almost a 40-year career in commercial banking, regional banking in the South, and now you have a company where you're providing advisory services to small businesses. I think that's pretty amazing.

I'm thrilled to be on. Thank you for having me as a guest.

You're welcome. Let me plug your book. You've got a book out called The BizX, B-I-Z-Z-I-C-S, Way, which of course you can buy in all the usual places and your website bizx.com, another place to find you. So let's start off with a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah. I, a lot of this is out there, but I'll just say I'm a little bit of an unusual person in the banking industry that I got the fever for banking very early on growing up in a town that Wachovia was headquartered in, and I saw a lot in that profession that appealed to me, the analytical side and finance, but also just personal connections and community commitment. Just, it was a great recipe for me. And so I moved to Nashville in '84 and started with a bank here called First American. And it's now Regions Bank. As we've just got comfortable with in the banking industry, there's always like 3 generations of what it used to be called.

All the mergers and acquisitions.

Yeah. And it's 40 years. It was every everything that I thought. I think the thing I didn't expect was the level of consolidation really blew my mind. And I think toward the end it was a lot about synergizing systems and things and not really as much about community and personal connection. I'm not saying that banks are devoid of that. They still do a good job, but it just had a little bit different vibe to it. And, and very early on in my banking career, I just got very interested in small business owners. I just think there's so much energy in the dynamic, so much authenticity and creativity that I was really drawn to that. And I feel like that's where I ended up spending most of my career in banking was either serving business owners directly or executive roles where we were trying to create a really healthy, memorable, wonderful experience for business owners with the bank.

I would think that small business owners are the bread and butter of regional banking.

It kind of ties. I think they still are. I think that these consolidations have created a dynamic as the organizations have gotten bigger, the meaning, the how meaningful half a million dollar loan is to a bank versus a $50 million.

Right.

Yeah, I think there's some relativity, but I think that the good banks, I think, have come to understand that small businesses are a tremendous funding source. They don't borrow all that much, but it's a good field for liquidity if you're doing it well. I think there are some really good banks serving small business owners out there today, but I think by and large, a lot of what they used to get 40 years ago has been systematized by technology and different things. And that's what led me to write the book and to do what I'm doing. I just feel like it's—

I had a personal banker 40 years ago. Now I got my—

this is my personal banker. It's on the app.

It's on the app.

Just look it up.

I live in central California, the exact center of the state. So it's rural. So for me to go to a bank now is a 30-minute drive. Oh, I appreciate the convenience, but I miss the personal touch.

Yeah. And I think as far as my book, I won't go into tremendous detail. Maybe later we touch on it, but I think that I just found as I started gravitating more toward advice, even in the banking environment, it was just a very confusing world. I would talk to business owners that have a book on their shelf. I'd want to talk to them. Talk about it and say, I've never read it. Somebody gave it to me. It's like there's 10,000 books out there or whatever. And yet I still heard, I heard a consistent theme about wanting momentum. And so I say, that's what I like to say about my book is it's simple, but not simplistic. I think I feel very confident having read a lot of books and been in business that something like mass times velocity can be translated to business. And if you have a little framework like that to tie a lot of ideas into, it can be a really powerful thing for you to remember and really just encourage your teammates and shareholders and everything. If we're going to have momentum, this is how it works. And I get a lot of, well, it's a great metaphor. And I always come back with, I don't know, I'm a little mystical in the fact I think it is a universal principle. So I firmly believe it's at work and a lot more than a metaphor.

So over all these years, you've looked at successful businesses and businesses that have been stagnant and of course businesses that have failed. If you were to look at the 1 or 2 or 3 really critical factors differentiate the successful small business from everybody else, what do you think it would be?

I think the biggest thing— this comes out in the book— is the energy field that's required for momentum. You can't have velocity without energy. And I think that the number one thing that I believe is it's such a push to get it launched, just getting from potential energy to kinetic and getting a rock rolling, it's a tremendous surge and a lot of effort. You find yourself all of a sudden, it's like, "I was right, this works!" And so you got to keep it rolling. Where is it all coming from? And I think that maybe we haven't equipped about how we transfer that energy to other people and continue to have people involved in it and continuing to feed it with individual energy toward the vision. There's a number of financial mistakes that I could point to that cost people the enterprise, but I really believe most of the time you run out of energy. We see in banking, we used to say if the top line is flat, they're already declining. It's like you've got, you've got to keep growing. You got to keep innovating and being as entrepreneurial as you were at the beginning. And I think that's another factor is once you've had success, the risk profile is very different. You know, you've gone from scraping around the couch for the spare change and not getting to pay the bills to, oh my gosh, I'm sitting on $500,000. I'm going to lose it. I think overall, just a leadership orientation. I think that's what I talk about the most is everything with my old John Maxwell days, everything rises and falls on leadership. And I think sometimes we. Especially for entrepreneurs that maybe haven't been in a corporate environment and had a lot of leadership development and that type of thing. It seems like it's just something intuitive that you're in charge and people are gonna follow you. And you discover like you've got leadership limitations, especially in the kind of people you can hire, the people that are willing to follow you, that you want the best. And you haven't really spent a lot of time like on yourself, what you're about, why people should follow you. And that, that investment in, in good leadership instincts is extremely important for a business to make it. And that's a hard thing to invest in.

When you don't see an immediate ROI. I've had— you're in the 350s, half the number of guests I've had on here. And I, when I talk to people who talk about success and they say that success in scaling is all about your first hires.

Who do you hire?

And a good leader is somebody who can spot talent that will fill in the gaps that the leader has and strengthen the leader's weaknesses. And those first 3 or 4 hires, I think I heard it from one guy who said that the idea is to hire somebody who knows how to hire somebody like themselves. Right.

Yeah, it is. And again, I won't dissect the book, but that's a major principle in the book is what is mass in business. It's not necessarily the size of it. It's mass is about density. It's about weight. And in the physical world, 98% of the mass of anything is in the nucleus. So who is your team? What's unique about the business and who are the people you've attracted to it? And I think sometimes there's a bit of a Pollyanna thought. I got it started. I'm the idea man and I'm going to go hire all these people and that's when it settles in. I'm going to work for you. You must know how great I am. That's why you're calling me, but I'm not sure I'm going to follow you. Don't wait too late to realize that there are certain gifts that you need to develop for to attract the right people. I think that's really important.

And I would imagine in today's environment, I'm looking at all this new generation of people coming into the workplace who have completely different values. Generational leadership strikes me as being, can be really challenging. Really, this is the first time I think in modern history where we've had 4 generations working in the workplace at the same time. Oh yeah.

The longevity.

You've got people like me who are still working, and then you've got the young 21-year-olds coming in out of college or even out of school. That—

yeah, I think it requires a certain openness. I think that's a— that's an advanced leadership skill to me, is a non-judgmental approach to life that honors the, the goodness and potential in every person. And it's your job to dig in there and find it.

I completely agree with you. And how do people develop these skills except with years and years of experience? But younger founders don't have that kind of experience yet. And is that when they come out and they hire you to give them some guidance and some help? I do.

I do. I enjoy that. I think that coming from the John Maxwell kind of school of thought, it's a learned behavior. I think there are certain personality things that can be an advantage in that, but it's really just learning the techniques that allow constant connection with people and good sharing, good understanding, and again, finding the best in the organization at all times. And I personally get very frustrated. I've got I guess my youngest child is 25 now, and I went through a time where I would just hear people disparage young people, drive me crazy because I feel like my kids are motivated. They're not like they're trying to solve the worst ailment in the world, but they're purposeful, driven, thoughtful people. And somehow maybe that's gone on forever. I don't know how you feel.

I really do think that— I actually read a really interesting study that said that there's no generational difference in workplace motivation. Because everybody says that Gen Zs are slackers. Not true. What we see and what this research shows is that as we get older, we tend— we're very young, we don't like working, we want to have more work-life balance. Every generation has gone through this. I remember back when I was young, I was that way. And now you get into your mid-career, now you're working hard because you want to advance your career, advance yourself financially. So you are a hard worker. And then you get older and you've made yourself financially secure, you start working less. And so it's where you are in your life journey determines your motivation to work. Unfortunately, people have looked at seeing these generational differences and they're blaming it on— they're stereotyping generations, which is unfair and incorrect. So part of what we have to do is understand that kids are on at the beginning of the journey. People like me, I've got a runway ahead of me, but it isn't where it was 70 years ago, 75 years ago.

I think, and this probably ties into the listening part of it, but I just feel we talk so much about empathy and so much of it comes at times or somebody's having a problem and we're supposed to be finding ways to be empathetic and understanding what they're going through. But yeah, that's valid. But I feel like most of the time people are not in a bad situation, but we're not equally driven to understand just their entire perspective in life. It's like we want to project a company vision and goals on somebody and ignore what they're coming in to work with. It's a whole person coming in.

I love that because there's some corporate America, large corporate America has this mantra, leave your emotions at the door. Right. They're asking their people to leave 95% of who they are at the door.

Right.

And they're only getting 5% of their employees. And what a waste.

Yeah.

And I think you see it. You just said it, that let's work with the whole person, whatever they bring. They've got strengths and weaknesses. Let's build up their strengths, minimize their weaknesses.

Yeah. It always amazed me in Nashville. Obviously it's a big music town and had so many people in banking over the years that I knew that they came here for music. Really? And so they would be like, the bank is a safe place. I can make a good wage. Wage and support myself in that.

Still have my garage band.

Yeah. And if you don't ever ask a question about what kind of music they play, you've shot yourself in the foot. You've missed an entire energy field that can come to life in there. Anyway, met a lot of those people over the years.

Let's talk a little bit about listening. This is called Listening with Leaders. I am— I teach listening skills. I'm a one-trick pony, but I do that because I have spent 10 years, from 2010 to 2020, in maximum security prisons training incarcerated people how to stop prison violence. And the number one skill that we used was teaching people how to listen to and name emotions. And I just became— I saw so many transformations that I just realized this is a skill that people don't have. From your experience, talk to us a little bit about your perspective on leadership listening, the importance of it, and how people develop it.

Oh man, I just— this is honestly why I've been so excited about talking to you, Doug, because I have so many thoughts about this. And I just say for me, I was I was personally forced to become a listener. I was like the middle child of 5, and my dad was a big talker. So I was kind of like, I grew some big ears just having to sit and listen to people. So I feel like sometimes people say, you're a good listener. I was like, I had no choice. I needed to. But I think from a leadership perspective, first of all, just going back to what we were talking about earlier, if your job is to lead people to something, I think that's basic definition of leadership. And the idea that you're going to end up in a place with all all the people that came along with you. I don't know how in the world you can do that without a complete understanding of people. If you're not listening to their words, to their body language, to their tone, to their— to the— just the resonance of their life, I don't know how you'll ever pull them along, especially when times are tough. I think just that alone is worth the investment. But I think there's also this really important leadership decentral— I call it in my book, it's fusion energy and not fission energy. Like, when empowering people as leaders, or even, you know, someone that's on your team to do certain things, you got to listen to what they're observing. It's a complete waste of time if everything that's known filters up to you and you don't— you're not listening. It's just a date with disaster. I just don't know how you would ever fully inform yourself about everything that's going on. There's a very practical side of listening that is all about ideation. It's about course correction. It's about So many different things, but I think we, we can get really proud of our ideas and our solutions. And I think we're the smartest person in the room. And when I talk to small business owners, almost universally, they tell me the hardest thing they've ever done is to delegate tasks. You know, after founding a business and doing 12 different things a day to decide that Jim is going to do more marketing better than I did it. Which is there's so much involved in our psyche. But I also think as it relates to my book, this is something I just wanted to bring out is that I think listening is such a bonding agent among people. And I think I'm looking at a different perspective than conflict resolution, maximum security prison, but just what's the mechanism by which we grow closer and we're unified toward what we're doing. And there's a mass principle beyond what's in the nucleus. The other part is how tightly bonded things are. And if we don't, if we don't have a great discipline for listening, it's going to be very difficult to have that connection. It's the John Maxwell title, Everybody Communicates, Few Connect. And I think our daily life as leaders is one of bonding, and that bonding throws off a lot of energy. It creates unity, it creates mass, and it's vital to moving the organization forward.

And that is what I love, that metaphor of bonding. And I have a concern that— and I'm curious about what your— how your kids are responding. These younger people in their 20s and younger grew up with asymmetric communication. I run across young people all the time that they don't know how to listen, but they're uncomfortable in conversation because they didn't learn it. Everything was by text, SMS, email.

Isn't it funny too, Doug? It's a whole new language that we've tried to replicate to those devices. What's the right emoji?

It's a total substitute for the signals that we naturally send to each other when we're in each other's presence. And the young people literally do not know how to talk to each other.

Yeah, and I've always made my share of mistakes. I think if you saw my report card, you'd probably tell me to go do some extra chores, but I think the one thing that I always tried to bring home to my kids is that I think one of the greatest skills that you can have as a teenager, early adult, is being able to talk to adults face to face. And there's just no substitute for it. And you're an expert practitioner in the field. When you break down communication and all you got is the words on a screen, and it's, I think, statistically 7% of what somebody's trying to say or convey to you. So I just view that as the back of the end zone in every relationship. Like, you're not—

that's right. So that was Israeli back in the '60s, but more recently there was a study done where they took mothers and young adolescents, 13, 14 years old, and they put caps on them, electrodes, and they measured the brain channel communications, what was going on in the brain of both the mother and the adolescent on face-to-face conversation and then Zoom video conversation. 9 channels are open when we're face-to-face. 2 channels are open.

Yeah, there you go. I like that.

Isn't that amazing?

That study. Yeah.

Yeah. And so we're all digital animals now, but digital communication loses 80% of what's in the—

Just, I don't know, I think it's too cosmic, but physical presence, there's an energy with people that you can't— even as good a conversation as we're having right now, like it would be different if we were in the same room.

That's right. And so what happened to my personal bank relationships that you would you have with people, business relationships and personal relationships, are what count. And when it comes down to the fact that you don't have those physical relationships, I think that's a major change. And I'm getting back to leadership and listening. I'm thinking that's going to be the challenge for the next generation of leaders, that they don't have the skill sets to work with people. Or maybe their teams— like so many people now have hybrid and remote teams, so you've got people spread out all over the world working for And how do you connect to your point? How do you connect and bond?

Yeah, I would have to, I think this whole thing with Zoom, we don't understand the implications of it. There's a hundred reasons for the, I don't know what they call it, the quitting, quiet quitting. And most of it seemed to go toward internal motivation for something. But I think that there's a lot more to physical presence and communication and that type of thing.

And there are advantages to Zoom for me, for example, living in rural California, the whole world is open to me and I talk to people people this morning at 8 o'clock. I was on a call with colleagues in Dubai, Switzerland, and then my friends in central Canada. And that was impossible before.

Yeah, that's the thing. I feel like it's kind of like the conversations I get in now about AI. And there's a lot of reasons to be concerned about that operator in AI. I think by and large, if you look at AI, it's a, just a tremendous opportunity.

Amazing tool.

Yeah.

Now you got to use it carefully. This book that I'm coming out in September, I heavily relied on AI for doing a lot of research, but then I went back and started sight-checking the references.

Yeah, yeah, you got to check it. Any faults, you just made them up.

Yeah. I had to go back and do it old school.

My limited play in AI is I have an agent for my book. It's got my book and everything I've written, and anybody that's interested in my book is basically going to have an experience with the book instead of just reading it. Like, they could probably understand the book from that, and I think that's phenomenal. And I guess I didn't I didn't want to dwell on the AI. What I was really going back to is a lot of these tools, like when even today it's like me getting on an airplane and like people are mad over there. I'm just like, I'm about to get somewhere in 2 hours. It would've taken me like a day and a half. I was like, thank you. It's like, that's right. Don't take it for granted. And so like the idea that we're doing this, Doug, like 30 years ago, like it was somebody's pipe dream.

Like everything.

Exactly. No latency, no whatever.

Yeah.

And so I think it, to me it comes back to what really makes the communication and the bonding work and how do you take that technology and make it work? Work for you. And one of the things that— it's a little bit maybe hokey, but I call it the BizX bonding formula. And it's this idea that we listen so that we can actually hear what people are saying, we remember what they said, and we act upon it. And if you can do those 4 things, you're going to have an amazing bond with somebody. Because it's all— that should be enhanced by the fact that we could be at least this level of face-to-face with somebody if we've done all that work.

That's right.

If you and I got on the call, this call, and I knew you were a Patriots fan and they won the Super Bowl, and I Patriots hat on, you go, dang, Chip remembered that about me. It's a very, it's a very powerful thing. Exactly. So there, there are opportunities with it. And I feel like, I don't know, say we got lazy with it, but I just think that we've accepted at a very basic level when it can do so much more for us. And yeah, I have a lot of hope about what people are gonna figure out about human relationships with the progression of AI. AI living in the expert knowledge world, what do we become as human beings? I hope we become better human beings in the process.

That's my hope too. And there is the possibility that AI will eliminate a lot of drudge work that people are paid to take care of now, and that will free them up in many ways to be able to self-develop, self-actualize, and then create, to your point, deeper bonds with other humans.

Yeah.

I got one more question.

I'm going to let you go.

What's one thing about yourself, Chip, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh my gosh. So many things. I ask every guest this question to close out the conversation.

I think it might be might be on a website.

But one thing I love to be able to tell people is that I'm a dual citizen of Ireland. I found myself lately just obsessing about what my grandmother's life was like there before she came to America in 1912. So I think it's, it's nice to have the stamp that, yeah, I'm technically a citizen, but it's more just the fascination of where I came from that was really unknown until very recently. I think I heard a few stories, but I'm reading a book right now about western Ireland in like the late 1800s and just realizing that she lived on a dirt floor. And like, I think about where her life ended up in Boston with a college graduate son and a bunch of kids, but that's my dad. Wow. And it just seems very strange. I'm sure people in America have the same experience, especially in the South with agricultural communities and that type of thing. But I get very fascinated about that.

Fascinating. That's really interesting. I play Irish fiddle, by the way.

Do you really?

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

I do that and I play jazz and blues guitar. Violin too.

Oh wow, that's very impressive. You're very accomplished, Doug. Thanks, Chip.

It's been really fun.

Anyway, this— thank you. I had the best time. Thank you for having me on.

Absolutely.

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. Doug Noll, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L.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 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 questions. 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.

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