From Navy to Leadership Coach: Patrick McNeil's Voyage to Transforming Organizations

Freddie D: 00:01:48

Patrick McNeil is a seasoned leadership development, professional and executive coach who brings 27 years of distinguished US Navy service as a Master Chief Petty Officer to his role as owner and Principal of Charthouse Solutions, llc.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Management from the University of Phoenix and a Master of Arts in Organizational Development and Leadership from Fielding Graduate University.

As an Associate Certified Coach ACC recognized by the International Coach Federation, he leverages innovative approaches including Lego are serious player methods for which he is both a certified pro trainer and facilitator. His expertise extends to his role as a Blanchard Authorized Partner, delivering programs in sliire building trust and management essentials.

He is also Certified in the TILT365 suite of assessments and has completed the TILT365 laser coaching masterclass at Charthe Solutions, Patrick employs a collaborative approach grounded in servant leadership principles, co creating solutions with clients to address their unique organizational challenges. His comprehensive service offering combines executive coaching, leadership development and organizational consulting.

Drawing from his military leadership experience and academic background, he specializes in delivering practical, results oriented solutions while maintaining a focus on personal growth and organizational success.

His unique combination of military discipline, academic knowledge and professional certifications makes him a trusted advisor to leaders and organizations seeking transformative change.

Freddie D: 00:03:29

Welcome Pat McNeil with Charth Solutions to the Business Superfans podcast show. We're excited to have you Pat.

Patrick McNeil: 00:03:36

Great. Thanks Freddie D. I appreciate the invitation to be on your show. Looking forward to it.

Freddie D: 00:03:41

Yeah, we're excited to have you on our show. Share with our listeners your story of where you came from and how you created Charthouse Solutions.

Patrick McNeil: 00:03:50

Great. So great questions. I started off right out of high school. I went into the military. I went into the Navy. I spent 27 years in the Navy.

Really had a great time. I enjoyed it. And when I got out I really struggled with trying to figure out where my lane in the road was going to be. What do I do?

The military does a really good job of telling you what to do, when to do, why to do it, and how to do it. They don't do a real good job of telling you what it is that you're doing. And as you progress, you start getting promoted.

You really stop doing your profession because Johnny needs some training. Susie's got a pain problem. We've got all these programs that are ongoing.

We've got an exercise to get ready for workups, all these sort of things that come into play. And then once you get promoted past that middle management, the boss comes in and says, hey, we didn't get our budget this year.

How are we going to meet our needs and requirements with the resources that we have. I had no idea what those were because in the military it's go fix something. Yes, sir. Aye, aye, sir.

When you carry it through, you don't ask whether or not it has a name of some sort. So it took me about 10 or 15 years once I got out of the military. My wife's Australian, so we moved and lived in Australia for 10 years. Years.

e at. So when we came back in: 2015

I wanted to do something where it was going to be fulfilling for me. It was something I was passionate about, but more importantly, I was creating value or giving value to the clients and the people that I worked with.

I just didn't know what that was.

So through the course of networking, someone grabbed me once and said, hey, you're pretty good at talking to people and getting them to see things from a different perspective. Have you thought about the coaching community? You can get paid for doing that.

So I migrated into the coaching community and then after being in there for a while and networking with people, Steve grabbed me and said, what are you passionate about? What do you, you know, think of the best job you ever had? What made you passionate about that job?

I wrote down a whole bunch of things and gave it to her and she said, what the heck are you doing over in hr? You need to be over in learning and development or coaching or the human side of things. So that kind of opened my eyes.

The two its that I was missing from my military time. I eventually got hired by a local Fortune 200 company here in the greater Phoenix area that was a global mining company.

Their headquarters was here in Phoenix, but they had mines all over the world or processing all over the world. And I got hired in their learning and leadership development. And that team that I worked with there, there were five of us.

Probably one of the best teams I've worked with in my adult working life. One of those teams where you'd follow them through the gates of hell with an ice bucket.

It was just such a great dynamic and such a good learning opportunity for me because my background is predominantly military and government, which everybody knows doesn't work right most of the time. So what? This was my taste in corporate America and how do I navigate that?

What's the difference between what I was doing in the military and what corporate America has going on? Then Covid hit and C suite Said you five people over here aren't integral to making ore into copper. Thanks very much.

We'll, we'll give you a nice little payout. And that was it. So that's how I got to where I am today. I started my own consultancy in executive coaching and leadership development.

I chose the name 27 years in the Navy. You can take the sailor out of the navy, but you can't take the navy out of the sailor. So as I was thinking about, okay, I'm setting up a business.

What's, what am I going to call it? You're going through all those things of the closer you are to the front of the Alphabet, the easier it is to find all those sort of things.

I wanted to help people navigate through their problems, underlying currents, the shoals that they're running into, the challenges that they're having. And on board the ship, the chart house is where all the navigation aids are kept.

So that's why I created Charthouse Solutions to help people navigate through their problems to become a better person, better team, better organization. So that's kind of me in a nutshell.

Freddie D: 00:08:05

That's a great story. What a great story.

I have a good friend that was also in the Navy, was a captain in the Navy and he was more involved in the construction aspect and contractual parts of things. He worked in Brussels at NATO for a little while and then lived 19 years in Hawaii and then moved here to Arizona a little while ago.

And ironically he's like mile and a half. And I met him at a networking function and we've worked together for years.

So I can appreciate where you guys come from and what you guys have contributed to our country.

Patrick McNeil: 00:08:41

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Freddie D: 00:08:43

So let's go deeper into that because I really like where you talk about the undercurrents and basically charting is direction.

How important is that for a small business to a solopreneur a mid sized business having a clear direction of where they want to go and how do you help them to find that direction?

Patrick McNeil: 00:09:04

Sarah, great question.

Every company, regardless of size, if you don't have a vision of where do you want to go and actually visualize yourself in the next three to five years, where do you see your company at? And setting up a structure to get from point A to point B, you'll never get there. You'll be doing zigzags in the water and you never get there.

I've always been a philosopher of the quickest way between point A and point B is a straight line. So how do we straighten that Line out. How do we get you to navigate? Straightforward. There's several ways that I can help out with that.

The first one is one of the bigger issues that I'm hearing today is retention of talent. So I started thinking about that and how does the military do it? After ruminating for a little bit, I came up with this idea of the EC3 principle.

Every military organization, regardless of size, has three things in common. They get a new CEO every 24 months.

One third of their workforce changes every year, yet they all seem to meet or exceed their goals, expectations, KPIs ROI for each year that they set out.

How does that happen when you have such turbulence with changing of a CEO and a leadership and changing of the workforce one third, that's a pretty huge chunk. And yet we've got civilian companies that are going, I can't deal with this. I've got 40% attrition or 30% attrition. How do we make this happen?

Then you see three principle is really simple expectations, Communication, commitment and consistency. In the military, every sailor from the time they get to basic training to the time that they exit service knows what's expected of them.

They know where they're supposed to be in that organization at that time. They know the expectations of their senior leadership. They know the expectations of people below them and to each side of them.

They know what those expectations are and it's communicated up and down the chain rather openly. And so they know what's going to happen. Then the commitment is the military has a commitment to us.

They provide us with medical, they provide us with training, they provide us with all the things that we need to survive in life in a house, to a roof over our heads and three squares a day is what he used to say in response to that. You get sailors and military people who give the extra effort. If something has to happen.

If you have a project that needs to be done by a certain date, they'll stick around and do it. And that's that commitment. That's a two way street between an organization and a workforce member. But the key to everything is the consistency.

Are you doing it regularly? Are you committed to putting things together and making sure that it's in that right order?

On the civilian side of things, what I'm seeing is that the expectations start with the recruitment. Organizations will put out, organizations will put out a job title, hey, we're recruiting for XYZ position.

And you get a whole bunch of people that apply to that job based on the criteria that they've put into that Job application, that job description, go through the recruiting process, they go through the interview process. All the interviews are lined up on this job description.

And when they get the letter of acceptance and hire, they come into their first day on the job, hey, yeah, I know we hired you for this position, but we really have a need over here for this position. So you've just broken the expectations of somebody who's coming into your organization right from the beginning.

Freddie D: 00:12:34

Oh, absolutely correct. Because if I look back at.

And it's good that you brought that up, Pat, because it reminds me of a company that I worked with recently that they would hire people and sometimes it wasn't the best person for the job, but it was the most cost effective person. And they would bring them in, they would train them verbally with no documentation.

Then they would turn around and say, okay, Pat, I just trained you last week. Why are you making this mistake? You should know better than this. Why are you doing it this way?

You're doing it wrong and this is costing us, causing this problem. It's all your fault because you didn't pay attention when I trained you last week.

That in turn sets a very negative environment for that new employee. More importantly, this particular scenario that I just described is real and it would be done, not done. They would do it in front of everybody.

And the whole company could hear this person getting chastised. That person would last maybe 90 days, maybe because they would say, okay, I'm done with all this verbal abuse. I'm outta here.

The company would turn around and hire somebody else. And it would be a rinse and repeat of the exact same bad habits. How often do you see that?

Patrick McNeil: 00:13:57

All the time. All the time. What's Einstein's theory of insanity? Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result.

That's what I'm seeing in a lot of organizations right now. That person didn't work. We maybe the education wasn't right, maybe the whatever wasn't right.

And the reality is it's the actual culture of that organization.

Freddie D: 00:14:16

Culture is everything. Culture is everything.

Patrick McNeil: 00:14:18

In the headshed? You bet. Absolutely.

If you think about it, this person who comes into the company spends 90 days and realizes, yeah, I just got hired for the wrong thing and this is not a good place for me to be, and leaves. What does that do to everybody else back in the ranch?

Freddie D: 00:14:33

Messes everybody up. It messes everybody up. Because here's the thing that people don't realize. I think we're both going to agree on this because it's a fact.

First off, you spend the time recruiting somebody, okay, so you got an expense there. Then you've got the expense of interviewing all the different people. Then you've picked an individual, you onboarded them.

Now you've got to get somebody to train them in that new position. Even though they may have the background skillset, they got to get trained to assimilate into how your company does things.

So now you're taking someone that's doing productive work and making them train somebody. So now you've got a newbie that's on board that's not making you any money, actually costing you money.

You've got somebody else that you've taken away from what they're doing to train this particular person. If that doesn't go, as we just discussed earlier, properly, because it's verbal training, it's not documented.

There's no plan, there's no direction, there's no encouragement. And that person leaves, like you just said, After 90 days, they realize, this isn't what I signed up for. They're gone.

You've got a whole boatload, to use a Navy term, a boatload of wasted revenue and time that you can't get back.

Patrick McNeil: 00:15:51

And they know where all the bodies are buried. They know everything about that company's internal goings. I talked to a senior leader about two months ago about recruitment and retention.

He goes, oh, I'm not retaining me. I'm trying to acquire. If you're scaling your business and you want to bring more people in, that's one thing.

But if you've got the revolving door on the front where you're trying to attack trailing, you can go to places like Glassdoor. There's websites out there where you can go and post. Where do you think these disgruntled people are going? They're going to go and post that.

Hey, you don't want to work in this place. Yeah, exact there is bad.

Freddie D: 00:16:25

I've seen that.

Patrick McNeil: 00:16:26

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The other thing that really I can't get my head around is they say that, okay, the cost of bringing somebody on board right now is what I'm hearing is about 20% or two times an annual salary. And that's just to the loss in bringing somebody back on board.

If you've got someone who's $50,000 a year times two, that's a hundred thousand dollars. Then you have the training on top of that, as you mentioned, and bringing everybody in and getting them up to speed.

Freddie D: 00:16:54

250 grand.

Patrick McNeil: 00:16:55

Exactly.

So if you're doing that four times a year, how can you Afford to let a half a million go out the door every six months or every 12 months, that just baffles me.

Freddie D: 00:17:06

It totally agree. You and I are exactly on the same page and all.

It takes a little bit of a mindset for executive management to look and put together a plan for their team. Because no team, no business. Because you get to a point where as a solopreneur, okay, you can do only so much, and you do.

But now if you want to move to, from solopreneur to having a couple employees because you're growing, you got to make sure that those people are on board. Because otherwise they fall apart and you've got that level of business, you can't handle it. You implode the way it is.

Patrick McNeil: 00:17:44

I talked to a leader three months ago who said, we're not hiring for the skills, we're hiring for the fit in the company. So they're taking a look at it from a different perspective of how is this person going to fit into our culture and are they going to fit in?

Because they know that they're trainable, they know that they can get out of them.

Freddie D: 00:18:05

Right.

Patrick McNeil: 00:18:05

And so their focus is more on culture fit than it is on. On. On the skill set or the required level of skill set for a particular position.

To me, that makes much more sense than trying to hire somebody who has a string of Alphabet behind their name and all kinds of education and practical experience. But they don't fit with your culture.

Freddie D: 00:18:25

Culture is key in the company because you've got one dissident, to lack of a better term. But the one that popped in my head, that is stirring things up in an organization and complaining about this and complaining about that, it spreads.

Now you got a toxic culture and other people that are good, people that have been there for a while, that are valuable, that fed up, and he says, I'm out of here. And you wonder, wait a minute, they've been here for three years. What happened?

You got a toxic person that created a toxic environment and smart people aren't going to put up with that. Yeah, yeah.

Patrick McNeil: 00:19:02

I will caveat this all with. When you go into the military, you have a roadmap to get from point A to point B. It's laid out for you.

If you want to stay in for 20, 30 years, there is a roadmap for you to go to, to see where do I have to go to next, what do I need to do, where are the training at all, that sort of thing. I don't see that a lot in corporate organizations or if you do see it, it's very limited because it's in a really good organization.

People want to stay. The benefits are good. They're caring for their people. There's promotion, they're empowering. They're making you feel valued in the organization.

Freddie D: 00:19:38

Absolutely. My wife in April will be seven years at the company she works for.

She's been working for them remotely for seven years, working out of the bedroom over there. They've gone through changes. She's not making as much money as she used to because of some of the changes. But the culture is outstanding.

They treat their team, I don't even call them employees. They really look at it as a team. They always send out unexpected gifts, they always have contests. So they keep everybody involved.

They fly everybody and even sometimes including spouses down the corporate to have a big annual get together so that all the remote people feel part of the family. They got it right. They've gone to north of a hundred million dollars and beyond in sales per year.

Patrick McNeil: 00:21:49

You know what happens when you do something like that, Freddie? You get this thing called discretionary effort.

When people are cared for, when you have those bonuses, when you have people that are recognized and are empowered, they're willing to go the extra mile. I gotta stay late Friday. Okay. Yep, no problem. I've got a project coming up. How would you like to lead that project? Oh, yeah. Yep.

Throw me in that briar patch. And that discretionary effort is what's missing in a lot of places. Especially if you don't have the right culture.

If you don't have that right culture. I need you to stay late Friday. Nah, I got a babysitter. I can't make it. I got something going on. I've got a commitment I can't get out of.

Freddie D: 00:22:25

Yeah, I got in my book Creating Business Super Fans. One of my quote in the book is people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition.

Patrick McNeil: 00:22:35

Yep, absolutely.

Freddie D: 00:22:36

I'll share a story. Back in the 80s when I was in the tech industry, I consider myself a pioneer.

I got involved in it in the beginning for computer aided design and manufacturing software.

We were prepping for a demonstration and it was late at night and the demos tomorrow and we want to make sure that we're presenting how our software can help design this thing for this company. So we're designing their part and learning their product into our platform.

It's about 11 o'clock at night and in walks our manager with pizza and beers. So we sat in the office for about an hour just eating our pizzas. Drinking beers in the office. Okay.

And he turns around and says, all right, guys, don't work too late. But I know you guys are going to work late. Appreciate all the effort and all that stuff. And he left the next day.

We had our presentation in the morning, and we killed it. Demo went really well. And he came back and says, okay, it's Thursday afternoon. I'll see you guys Monday. Get the heck out of here.

And I'll never forget that that was one of my learning management techniques or skills that I saw. And I've. I still remember it, I still share it, and I've done that when I've led teams. This is okay. We killed it. We got our stuff.

Get out of here, guys. Go. Bye.

Patrick McNeil: 00:23:53

That's great. When that happens, I'm rather the same way.

I've had really good leaders, and I take the best of each of them to put my own kit bag together of how I'm going to approach and do things.

The challenge is there's so many, for lack of a better term, and I don't want to say bad leaders, maybe uneducated leaders that they don't know where to grab from, and they're grabbing only what they know instead of what they should be doing.

Freddie D: 00:24:18

Yeah, yeah. I'm still a super fan of that manager because he always went out of the way. He would throw parties at his house and invite everybody over.

Patrick McNeil: 00:24:29

Yeah.

Freddie D: 00:24:29

We felt like we were family in a sense.

Patrick McNeil: 00:24:32

Sure, sure. Absolutely. And you're right, those super fans are very critical to have in your network. I still.

Some of the leaders that I had in the Navy, I'm still in connection with today. If it's just for once a year that we get together and have a phone call or talk. But still, that's unheard of in today's.

Freddie D: 00:24:50

worked with back in the early: 1981

And we started on the exact same day. We didn't know anybody, and we were the two newbies and said, let's just hang around together, and we're still friends decades later.

Patrick McNeil: 00:25:08

Amazing how that happens. Yeah.

Freddie D: 00:25:10

Let's go back, Pat, to. Back to the employees, because I want to talk.

So if you've got a great culture and people, the employees feel appreciated and they're happy about the work environment, that tonality, that energy is going to come across to prospective customers. Right.

Existing customers, if they're dealing with suppliers or distributors or complementary businesses, that energy, that positiveness is catchy likewise, if they're disgruntled and in an unhappy environment, that energy is going to come across. I think people don't realize that their employees or team is a catalyst to business growth.

Patrick McNeil: 00:25:57

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. They're spread like wildfire. One's just very positive and the other one's just very negative.

How do you bring that in and make that work for you? On that positive side, it all comes down to culture. What is your culture like?

My thought is that every organization could have a waiting list of people that want to get into their organization because people are staying that long and wanting to contribute because of the culture of an organization. I know two or three that are out there, but that's only two or three of what?

Thousands and hundreds of thousands of businesses and organizations worldwide.

Freddie D: 00:26:31

Yeah. That's why I, you know, talk about you want to create super fans out of your team.

Those super fans will transform prospective customers into super fans, existing customers, complimentary businesses. And it just snowballs if you think about it. Imagine having all your stakeholders as your sales force and excited to do it for free.

What would happen to that individual's business?

Patrick McNeil: 00:27:00

You'd be scaling. I think you'd be scaling having to bring people on because business is just great. I don't have enough people to handle what we've got.

Freddie D: 00:27:09

Exactly. Because you got that army of people being brand advocates, or I call business super fans. There's only one thing that business can do. It'll skyrocket.

And it won't cost them a ton of money.

Patrick McNeil: 00:27:20

No, not at all. To smile at somebody coming in to say hi to your security guard sitting on the front desk.

You hear all these stories of knowing the janitor's first name and getting to know the janitor.

There's a story that at the Air Force Academy where one person befriended this gentleman who was a janitor, and it turns out that the guy was actually a Medal of Honor winner from World War II. And nobody bothered to stop and talk to him. Nobody bothered to ask him. Nobody bothered to get his story.

And when you get those stories like that, it opens your eyes to who people really are. And you have to know that in order to build a culture.

Freddie D: 00:27:57

So let's talk a little bit more about your services and how you help these businesses that you're working with or how can businesses reach out to you for your assistance to help them transform their current environment so you can position them to scale?

Patrick McNeil: 00:28:15

Yeah, absolutely. We talked a little bit about structure and bringing structure to an organization to help you with that training piece, right?

How do you do the training? One of the tools that I use is called LEGO Serious Play.

the LEGO company in the late: 1990

So if you have a question or a idea or something that has more than one right answer, you want to break the paradigm of the 80, 20 meetings and get to 100% and you want participation and engagement in coming up with the answers. LEGO Series play is the right thing for you. It can be used for strategy. I used it for my master's degree to get for team identification.

I put that into play when I was getting my master's in leadership development. Innovation.

If you've got an entrepreneur or a group out there that are trying to be innovative and how do we look at the next phase of doing something in our process, it is great for innovation. I use it in my coaching process as well. It really helps people. It's based on neuroscience.

And neuroscience tells us anytime we're using our hands, our brain is 75 to 80% active. And when our brain is that active, we think differently and we have different conversations.

Then what they did was, is okay, you go into a Lego shop and you see the Eiffel Tower and you see the Vulcan Death Star and pictures and flowers and all kinds of things. Those are all things in the real world, things we can go out and touch and things that we can go out and see.

How do we capture things that we have in our brain, like ideas and experiences and thoughts?

And what they did was they created a process where you develop a three dimensional model using metaphor and storytelling to create what your thought, idea or experience is and have a conversation around that.

And when you get 12 people sitting around a table talking about one question and you've got 12 different answers, that really opens it up for robust conversation. And how do we go forward? What do we need to do? How do we collaborate better? How do we communicate better? So that's one of the main tools that I use.

Then getting back to that structure piece, I'm a really a huge believer in, not just because I am one, that coaching is essential for personal development and for professional development, whether it's an internal coach. Some companies are big enough to have people within their training departments that are certified as coaches. And that's all well and good.

It helps with that personal and professional development. It helps. It helps with objective perspectives. Having you see things differently, it enhances your decision making process.

How many leaders are out there and they don't know how to delegate or they don't know how to use deductive reasoning to come up with the answer that they need to. It improves your communication skills. More importantly, it's essential for succession planning.

How are you going to have somebody promoted from within if they're not ready to get there and coaching helps you get there.

There's a plethora of data out there from Forbes, from Harvard business review, from CEOs of companies that said they wouldn't get to where they're at right now if they hadn't been coached in some way, shape or form.

Freddie D: 00:31:50

Because sometimes, and I'm sure we both have run across where you've got. The business owners built it up and they've got a team.

It may not be a huge team, it may be family members, et cetera, but they have a hard time delegating and letting go. Because I'm the only one that can do it this way. I'm the best at it and so I have to do it. You can't scale with that kind of a mindset.

So exactly what you say is you've got to help these look at not only the culture, but processes and approaches. And you've got a coach can actually help that owner learn how to let go. That's the hardest part is I just gave it to Johnny and he did it wrong.

And look, it costs us money. Johnny needs to learn and you need to encourage Johnny instead of saying, saying he did it wrong. Hey, great effort.

Here's a couple tweaks that I would do the next time so you can do this better. You help build up Johnny versus he done it wrong. That's why I have to do it.

We both have run into people that operate that way and then they can't figure out why they can't grow their business.

Patrick McNeil: 00:32:58

Absolutely. I'm a huge believer in the phrase failing forward. I had a leader use that on me one time. I had screwed up drastically in the Navy.

It was an accident, but I thought my career was over. I thought, this is it. My, my contract's up in six months, I'm going home, I'm going to do all kinds of things.

And he sat down with me, him and the other leader in the team and they said, no, we think you've got value. We think that this was an oops. And this is back in the 80s, this was 83, 84, where this kind of thought was not around and they allowed me to fail.

I paid for it. But that payment back was the learning process. What did you learn from the mistake that you made? What did you learn from that piece?

And I've taken that with me everywhere to allow people to fail at what they're doing. If you do it once, it's a fail. If you do it twice, it becomes a habit. And then you have to really re look at things. Is there intent?

Is there other things behind it? But to do it once, somebody may not know how to do it. And somebody may not be able to stand up and say, hey, I don't know how to do it.

And that's the key thing.

Freddie D: 00:34:09

You can also look at Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan said he basically failed more times than he succeeded. And, and that's because he took more shots and failed.

The fact that he took more shots at trying to get it into the hoop meant that his percentage of what went in was higher because of the probability of more. So if it was, 10% went in. But 10% of a thousand is a hundred shots. And those hundred shots win game.

Patrick McNeil: 00:34:42

Absolutely they do. Yep. Absolutely. Now, that's a great analogy. I'd heard that before. It's been a while.

And there's a lot of other sports analogies that you can put in there with that. But I. The Michael Jordan one's the one that always sticks out with me. Yeah, take your shots.

Concert pianists don't wake up in the morning and just start playing the piano. Michael Jordan didn't just get up one morning and start slam dunking. You have to go through the process.

You have to learn, you have to train, and more importantly, you have to practice. That practice piece is fairly forward sometimes, you know.

Freddie D: 00:35:13

Yep. And you gotta have a coach. Let's look at the movie industry. Actors don't become actors just naturally. They go through training. They've gotta learn.

They may have some basic fundamental skills, but to take it to a whole nother level, you've gotta get training, you've gotta fail. Like you said, failing forward is really the important part to look at it.

Patrick McNeil: 00:35:37

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

Freddie D: 00:35:40

Pat, as we wrap up here for our listeners, can you come up with a couple takeaway points that we can just bulletize that they can? Listeners that are listening to the show can implement into their own businesses.

Patrick McNeil: 00:35:53

Listen to your people. The best coach, the best leaders in the world listen more than they talk. Someone told me once, you know why God gave us two ears?

Because we're supposed to listen twice as much as we speak.

Freddie D: 00:36:05

Yep.

Patrick McNeil: 00:36:06

So, as leaders, I. I would suggest listening to your people, listening to what they have to say.

Invite them into the conversation about what your vision's looking, what your values are for your organization. How do you want to get from point A to point B? I'm not just talking about your senior leadership.

It should come from somebody in the mail room all the way up. You need to get that perspective because you could do something at the top that affects them at the bottom. So that's.

The first one is listen more than talk. The second one is training with purpose. And by training with purpose, I mean make sure you have that structure in place.

If you're going to send someone to training and they come back and they go, this is the neatest thing since sliced bread. But there's no structure to support that. There's no coaching behind it.

There's no way of reinforcing it, because three weeks down the road, they're going to sit there in the office and go, what did he say at hour three of the training that we had last week? And maybe he didn't take enough notes or whatever. So have that structure put in place.

And the last one is, don't be afraid to get outside the box and to do the failing forward. There are a lot of different processes, different things. I'm using Lego. There's humor, there's music, there's comedy.

There's all kinds of things that you can bring in to help with that process. Be adventurous, get outside the box.

Freddie D: 00:37:27

That's great. That's great input, Pat, for our listeners.

So give me the three key words again that you said was one, listen, number two, structure three is out of the box.

Patrick McNeil: 00:37:37

We can use either one of those.

Freddie D: 00:37:39

Okay, excellent points for our listeners. Great having you on the show here, Pat. Fabulous conversation.

I think we hit on a point that's really important for small businesses, is implementing a solid culture that retains people and energizes and creates their team into super fans that in turn promote that business. So how can I. How can our listeners find you, Pat?

Patrick McNeil: 00:38:03

I'm easy to find. You can get me on LinkedIn. Patrick McNeil. You can't miss me. My.

My picture's unique out there, but, yeah, you can get me on there, or you can go to my website, www.charthousesolutions.com, all lowercase. And in there you can see some of the other tools that I have in my toolbox, the processes that I use for coaching.

Some of the Lego serious play is in there as well. You can learn a little bit more. And then there's also a link where you can click on it and get a hold of me@infoarthousesolutions.com thank you.

Freddie D: 00:38:39

And do you have an offer for our listeners there?

Patrick McNeil: 00:38:41

Pat I'm a firm believer the conversations are free. If someone has an interest in what I'm doing, let's have a conversation.

I do provide a discount for nonprofits and for veteran organizations, so if there's any of those out there, give me a call. Let's have a conversation. Talk and see what we can do. My focus is to help Everybody. Okay.

Freddie D: 00:38:59

Pat McNeil with Charthouse Solutions. Thank you so much for being a guest on a business superfan podcast show.

We'd love to have you on the show down the road and thank you very much and have a great upcoming holiday.

Patrick McNeil: 00:39:12

Thanks, Freddie D. I appreciate you having me on board. I'm a super fan of you and of what you're doing out there. So great stuff. Keep going.

And Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you, too.

Freddie D: 00:39:22

Likewise.