Kevin Jones February 19, 2020 You’ll often hear me speak of a pair of values that I treasure the most in people, humility and respect.

These two values go hand-in-hand in how we hold them and act upon them. Since any word can have multiple definitions, let’s get some clarity on how I see each of these terms. I like to think of humility as the absence of bad pride or arrogance. You may be curious as to how I see good and bad pride, and the best way I’ve heard this explained is by Seth Avett’s (Avett Brothers) lyrics: “The pride your Momma had and not the kind that makes you bad.”  With respect, it’s having an admiration not for titles or socio-economic status, but what makes people special: their abilities, certain qualities represented in their character, and their achievements, both individually and with others.

One of the reasons I relate so well to these values, and their high esteem in small towns and rural America, is because of my roots in the High Country of western North Carolina. I was raised by a single mom, and she instilled these values in my siblings and me on a daily basis. But she wasn’t unique—that was our culture in Ashe County. In small places like my hometown of West Jefferson, we always knew who the wealthy folks were, who inherited what from whom, and we also knew—because it was most of us—who lived a more humble existence.

We knew who the pastors were, the bank president, the mayor, as well as who owned the big Christmas tree farms (that’s the big industry in my neck of the woods).  And yet, we didn’t confer any status or merit on any of those people, much less their kids or relatives, without them earning it—and some of them certainly did.  These lessons weren’t just said, we just breathed the air of that place, and it permeated these values of humility and respect. The thing that I love most about consistently challenging myself to live these two characteristics, and also consistently responding with these as my top advice, is that you cannot live an entitled existence while striving to be humble and respectful.  Respecting our fellow man (and woman) is the cheapest for us to give, yet most valuable gift they can receive.

As I shared recently with some incredible community leaders in my hometown, I’ve taken these Ashe County values in my travels around the country and around the world and applied them to virtually everything. Nearly every day, some kind of interaction triggers one or both of these perspectives, the dual lenses through which I see the world. When one of my colleagues comes to me for mentoring, I am immediately humbled. I find the respect I give people increasing and decreasing primarily based on my perception of their contributions and core values. 

I am far from perfect, and none of us are expected to be. But my challenge to myself and any of you reading this is to stay constant in pursuit of these virtues of humility and respect. Sometimes, it’s easy. It’s really easy to promote or reward someone, out of respect, when you see them showing initiative, and achieving crazy new levels of greatness. Other times, it’s hard. I’ve left situations that were really good for me when I felt like those around me would not honor these values and therefore failed to treat people right. I simply can’t abide by blatant arrogance and a lack of respect, especially for people who, while they may not have yet arrived in their careers, are giving everything they have and are progressing toward their goals.

But to have sustained success and joy in this journey, there are no other characteristics more critical than humility and respect.

Kevin Jones October 1, 2019 I’ve been tasked with leadership for most of my career. People often ask me what it takes to be an effective leader, and I often answer that to become a good leader, you need to be a good follower first. Subscribing to this maxim is important for people at all levels of an organization. Even as a CEO, I must follow the leadership of my board of directors, which includes some of my most trusted advisors and investors.

Here are just a few of the important ways we can develop ourselves as followers, so that our leaders can help us reach our full potential.

Be Character-Driven

Being a leader or follower takes character, because having character is the foundation upon which we build trust with others. Being character-driven yields great credibility in friendships, marriage, and parent-child relationships, and it’s just as effective in professional life.

Anyone who reads my work knows that there are two character-defining values that I hold above all others:  respect and humility.  Those who respect others—not based on job titles or perception of power—but on personal merit, show that they are open to learning. When you place respect on others, you are, in fact, anointing them to share their views as equals. Respect shows honor, and you’ll get honor in return.

The other big character-driver for me, the yang to respect’s yin, is humility.  When you are humble, you are literally placing your own ego in submission to your desire to learn. In effect, it’s doubling down on the respect you place on those who merit that respect. You’re effectively saying to them, I can’t do this alone, and I know you have something valuable to contribute. When a true leader detects both respect and humility on your part, there is no limit to what you can achieve together.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

I work very hard to create cultures where my team and I can take risks in the service of our clients, stakeholders, and each other. When you’re all in it together, there should be room for everyone to take the risks necessary to raise their performance standards higher day after day. I often tell team members that you will not ever “ski the blacks” unless you are willing to fall.

To be a good follower and leader, it’s imperative that you take risks. No leader can afford to manage to the status quo, which is the enemy of growth. Rather than covering your behind, you need to put yourself forward, knowing that you’re going to fail sometimes. A true leader will recognize those who fail, learn from those failures, and achieve even bigger success along the way as the greatest assets of their organization.

Be Accountable

While it’s fine to take risks and make mistakes, it’s unacceptable to lack accountability. Accountability, like respect and humility, is a character-driver and trust-builder. When your leaders know you are accountable, they are more likely to give you plum assignments that will help you grow, because they trust you. Whenever I need to delegate leadership in an area, a person’s accountability is just as important as their performance. Just like a mutual fund disclaimer—past performance is not an indication of future returns—we know that counting on someone means that you’re able to trust them when the chips inevitably are down.

It’s also critical to helping your leadership assess where real problems lie in an organization or externally. If you’re willing to step up and own your mistakes, it’s that much easier—in this business world that often feels like it moves at the speed of light—for everyone to re-chart the course necessary to achieve the goal.   Being accountable is not only right from a moral perspective, but also from a practical point-of-view. Accountability increases efficiency. The fact of the matter is that any good business is going to make mistakes, and the higher the accountability in the organization, the more time we spend fixing problems and the less time wasted on figuring them out.  

Seek Mentorship

This world is bigger than all of us, so we need to know that we’re in it together, not just as teams, but with someone who has our back. At every level of my career—performer, manager, middle manager, executive, founder, and CEO—I’ve had at least one, if not several go-to mentors. 

Mentors can do many great things for you. They can validate your great ideas, shoot down your terrible concepts, or help you work through those that deserve more attention. They can help you trust your instincts or help you identify situations where you might need to gather more data versus making a gut move.

Perhaps most of all, mentors can help us by simply being good humans. Those of us who care about being the best we can be at home and at work can be our own worst critics. I can tell you genuinely that one of my favorite aspects of mentoring is helping someone I love to pick themselves up after a failure.  Giving that energy back to someone who works hard, is trustworthy, and is full of that humility and respect I covet is a real blessing to me.  

See a Bigger Picture than Your Own

When you decide to become a great follower, it’s also imperative that you’re able to see a bigger picture than the one that’s your routine perspective. We have to empathize with our leaders to know how they contextualize their decisions, so that we can have greater understanding and meet the needs of their organization.

There’s always a bigger picture. If you’re a sales performer, your manager may have full profit-and-loss responsibility that forces certain frameworks on their decisions, contrary to your own context that’s centered on revenue.  Even as wide and complicated of a perspective as I have in my CEO role, does my leadership at LLR, our major investor, have a bigger picture than Celero? Of course they do, and what we achieve needs to fit in the context of their entire investment portfolio.

It’s easier to see how to be a good follower when you don’t have any management or leadership responsibilities. Many of you reading these thoughts of mine, however, have those kinds of responsibilities. You must be extra diligent to not only build your leadership, but also strive to become a better follower every day. Here’s the best part—doing both adds up to being a successful professional, and more importantly, a better person.

Much has been written and discussed on the notion of the performance-based culture. This is a concept that I bought into as a very young manager, and I’ve expanded on it through my years leading larger and larger groups of people as they accomplish great things together.

Focusing on people doesn’t just mean hiring right, nor does it stop at training. It means a commitment to their development, helping them align their own built-in purpose to the needs of your organization, so you can grow together and succeed together.

Values Alignment

I’ve always had the thrill of managing very diverse teams, people coming from all walks of life. Maybe it’s just my upbringing in the North Carolina mountains, where we all scrapped to make a living and take care of each other, but I never ascribed any kind of merit or status based on somebody’s wealth, skin color, or whose son or daughter they were.

To the contrary, it was ingrained in me, as I was raised by my single mom, to be humble and respectful, and to honor those who showed humility and respect for others.  I took this to heart in a big way—I’ve collected many friends along my journey through life, and these are the two common denominators in those I value most. To a person, the men and women in my life work hard at whatever they do, and they do so humbly, going out of their way to show respect to others. And the values they have transcend all walks of life, so you naturally find yourself surrounded by men and women, people of different races and ethnicities, rich, poor and middle class, and any of the other ways in which society is happy to differentiate us.

Challenging Mediocrity

I think with any large group of people, you’re going to have some application of the 80/20 rule, where your top 20 percent pulls the team goalward, or a bell curve, where you have some at the high-performance end, some pretty weak performers, and a fat middle who range from those who just need a little boost before they become top performers to those just another cycle away from joining the bottom-feeders. 

Whatever diagram applies to your group, it’s important for all to challenge mediocrity. When you consistently challenge your team to do more, to do better, to do things more simply, and to do those things faster, you find out where the leaders are. I’ve always prided myself on doing the work necessary at leadership level to take this ethos a step further.  If you want to know my opinion on the secret sauce to success—and more specifically, what I feel has helped to drive the success of my teams—it’s that I consistently challenge mediocrity in all its shapes and forms at individual level.

Anybody can—and should—reward top performers with raises, bonuses, and promotions. But the real reward for leaders comes from startups, and better yet from turnaround projects, and we need to think of those possibilities not just in the organizations we lead, but in the individual sense.

From Worst to First 

I’ll give you an example of employing this strategy with individuals. At 27, I found myself leading 10 branch offices of a regional bank. Each office had a manager, assistant manager, and about five entry level sales executive employees. The leader of our division, one of my earliest and best mentors, was committed to building a high-performance culture, and it was great for me to gain early exposure to this concept in a bank environment.

My own path showed just how exciting of a culture my early mentor was building. Within just over a year, I had earned three promotions after leading my division as an individual, as a branch manager, and as a regional manager in new loans generated. Our entire team was known as a group of champions.

I learned one of my bigger lessons in leadership, when I was handed a new opportunity to double the size of my region. Instinctively, since I was raised to treat people with respect as individuals, I began studying my new employees and surveying their managers and peers. This process armed me with the information I’d need to tailor a management style to each individual’s needs.  

One of the first things I did was to confront our team’s weakest links. My theory was that the team would win if these folks did better, or if they left. What I discovered, by focusing on each individual’s needs, is that sometimes when you meet people where they are, without sacrificing your standards, you’ll see people that can actually go from worst to first.

One of the more important people in my life is just such an example. He’s one of those I confronted after taking over additional branches. The word on this guy was that he was very bright, but his poor attitude reflected not only in his own performance (or lack thereof), but also in the flagging performances of those he’d befriended most.

Tough Love Works When People Need It

I chose an approach of tough love. When I confronted him, I let him know how much potential I thought he had—in fact, I let him know that he could become our best performers in the entire region (and one of the bank’s stars) based on his grasp of the business and his people skills. I also let him know that should he rise to my expectations, raises, promotions, and the thrill of every success awaited, and in short order.

But I also told him that there was another path. He could do us all a favor—especially himself—and find another job where he might be more self-motivated and ultimately happier. Needless to say, and the reason I’m obviously sharing this example with you, our bottom performer chose the harder path and stayed. And he didn’t just stay. He excelled in every aspect of his job, becoming one of the best examples and motivators to others. I ended up putting this guy—who himself came within an inch of being fired—in charge of all of my region’s hiring and training! 

It’s About Them, Not You

That level of success that we achieved together was eye-opening for me. People have different needs, and managers and leaders should uncover those needs and respond to them in kind. Our bottom performer, it turns out, needed to be challenged more creatively. In any profession, there are lots of problems that require creative minds to find solutions. I found him to be an incredible strategic partner, and my role in his success was simply to help him find ways to unleash his creativity. Now, nearly a quarter-century later, he holds a very important role here at Celero.

I believe strongly that an effective CEO should focus on facilitating great decisions, as opposed to always making decisions ourselves. That requires a lot of work and focusing on culture, so that people can perform in ways that fulfill their purpose and hit your goals, too.

A performance-based culture is a fair culture that rewards team members who create value. It challenges the top performers and keeps them engaged. I have found that in the day-to-day, some team members prefer comfort, but over time, they will leave if you aren’t cultivating them to reach their potential.

I think intentionally about those who report to me and work in my organizations. A driving thought is ensuring that if they chose me as a mentor or my organization as home, that I have high expectations for myself, as we them to reach their full potential. Through my career, my greatest joy and success is playing that role with others:  recognizing and cultivating excellence in the individuals on my team and witnessing their growth, in their careers and in life.