My wife and I and my daughter have a strong CrossFit community, and the neat thing about
this church is my wife, very outgoing, we've had as many as nine of these young CrossFit
20-something athletes join us at church.
So it's just been a wonderful, wonderful thing.
What church do y'all go to down there?
We're at Community Bible Church.
Okay.
Oh, that's a good church.
Yes, right there in Stone Oak.
Yes, with Pastor Ed.
Good for you.
What a small, small world.
I know.
I love it.
It's like I'm talking to a friend here.
Yeah, well, you know, and there's such good, strong churches in San Antonio.
My wife and I, God's got us in Austin right now, but there are times my wife particularly
is tired of Austin.
We love Texas.
And if we left Austin, I think she'd be all right with that.
I bet.
And I used to think it was a transitional city for me, you know, coming from Denver,
Colorado.
I was like, oh, never been here before.
And then I get there.
And then five years passed.
And then 10 years passed.
And now I'm almost at 20.
I'm like, what in the world just happened?
All of a sudden, breakfast tacos are on the menu three days a week.
I cannot get into breakfast tacos.
Oh, they might send you back if they find that out.
San Antonio is like the heart of breakfast tacos in the whole universe, I think.
Yes, I'll go for a coffee and a banana nut bread.
Tell me more about your vision with Nelly Leadership Group.
Where did it come from?
Neely.
I'm sorry.
Healing in prayer.
Neely.
Yeah, Neely Leadership Group.
Well I think two paths, really.
One, I became, my family's not a church family, but I became a follower of Jesus at a very
young age.
And I'm growing up with friends going to church with them.
And I'm reading the Gospels and I'm seeing what a servant leader looks like.
And then as I was 14, 15, 16, emerging into some of my first jobs, Javanka, I just had
bad bosses.
I had several bad bosses.
And I'm looking at what this model of servant leadership is that I'm reading about in the
Gospels.
And then I'm working for people that had anger management issues and were putting themselves
first and sarcastic and belittling.
And I think that kind of awakened a passion in me around really stewardship of the influence
you've been given.
And it's never gone away.
My dissertation studies were on what makes a good leader a good leader.
I've written a couple of books in that area.
And to the degree that I get to speak into people, you'll never be a better leader than
you are a person.
That's really what I'm passionate about.
Along the way, I was able to speak enough and get up on enough stages that the National
Speakers Association recognized me as a certified speaking professional, this elite group of
speakers worldwide.
And I've got 5 million frequent flyer miles from clients traveling me all over the world.
And so it's really been you and me sharing faith.
It's really been this unction, this call, this passion that, you know what, my place
in the world is to help creation be a little bit better by making leaders recognize the
sacred stewardship they have of the team they lead.
And that's amazing.
I was reading your website and I think the question states, so don't quote me, but have
you ever had a bad boss?
Oh my goodness.
That nearly, I was like, yes, yes, speech to me.
Yeah, exactly.
So I had early on in my career, I had a boss who had anger management issues.
And at one point it was a construction crew.
We were going from job site to job site and in a Ford F-250 pickup truck.
And I was sitting in the passenger seat working on the paper for the job as he's driving to
the next job sites, wearing his head off.
He grabbed the stapler out of my hand, opened it up and proceeded to whack my leg with an
open stapler just because he was so angry and driving staples into my leg.
And I'm like a 17 year old kid.
I don't really know what's right and wrong yet, but I knew that was wrong.
And I think, you know, whether it's physical violence, a stapler into your thigh or abusive
language, you know, it's just, leaders have a sacred responsibility, whether they're spiritual
or not, to lead their people well.
And you know this, Javanka, because of your positions as well.
Those of us that are in positions of leadership, we're at the bottom of the pyramid.
We're not at the top of the pyramid.
And so interesting enough, our corporations, do they actually call you and say, hey, there's
like a need or is it an actual leader who's contacting you to say, hey, I want to learn
more?
How do they get and connect with you?
Yeah.
So it's basically organizations that ask me to come in and train.
Most of the time I'm working with frontline managers, managers with one to seven years
of experience who are leading their teams and they're struggling with employee turnover,
call outs with customer service scores and aren't where they need to be.
And the senior leadership knows it's a leadership issue and we're not quite sure how to solve
it.
So they say, can you come in and consult with us and help us figure out what's going on?
And so it's typically senior leadership asking me to come in and work with their middle managers.
I also do some executive coaching where I'll work primarily in the smaller business space
where I'm working with CEOs or C-suite people.
Recently I had an engagement where the CEO is asked me to help the COO elevate their
abilities to eventually become CEO in a couple of years.
So a couple of years.
Awesome.
That's a development for them to grow into their...
Now I like that.
I love that.
I love it.
Yeah.
The scary thing is I've done this a couple of times now and the last time I was asked
to come alongside a COO and help them grow, at the end of about six months, the COO, the
CEO and I all looked at each other and said, he's not the right person.
How do you move the notch from going over to that point and being able to make that decision
or advise who has chosen to speak to you?
Like, hey, what do we do here?
Well, and I think...
So that really brings us to one of the keys is leaders need to learn to have hard conversations.
In fact, I will say one of the defining differences between somebody who's just a manager and
somebody who's a leader, managers get the easy conversations, leaders get the hard conversations
where how do I sit across the table at a coffee shop from you because you and I had to get
out of the workplace and talk about X and how do I retain your dignity while I still
let you know you're not meeting the mark?
And you and I talked about profit, but I would say I suspect both of us work with nonprofits
and ministry organizations.
They still need to have those hard conversations because there's a mission of the organization
that they're supposed to accomplish.
I've worked for many years with a gal that is deeply involved with the Heart Association
and out in California and she feels like her life is a series of hard conversations because
people aren't performing and yet they have donors that are giving them money.
They have healthcare institutions that are expecting them to come alongside and that
tension of managers get the easy conversations, leaders get the hard conversations.
Do you have like a diagram or something that you use?
No, I mean, I have a little visual of those four leadership necessities.
I probably should hire a VA to help me develop some type of diagram.
I do have some resources and one of them that I make available to leaders is the best practices
on how to hold a hard conversation and a little conversation planner.
We can talk about that maybe toward the end of our time together and how people can access
some of those resources.
But it is interesting, Javanka, because I've owned and operated these swim schools now
for 15 years.
I've had an Ely leadership group for 25 or 28 years now, but it's always been a consulting
and coaching and keynoting.
Most of my work is workshops and coaching.
I do a few keynotes, but mainly workshops inside companies.
But as you said, now I've got 175 people that work for me on the other half of my business
and I've got a management team of seven managers that I'm having those very same hard conversations
that then you and I are telling our client, here's how to have a hard conversation and
yet you're going to make some mistakes.
Javanka, I remember the early on in my career, one of my first management positions, I had
a salesperson and she was a very good salesperson, a top performing client facing salesperson.
But she had anger management issues.
Her home life was a little out of control, which meant her on time performance was challenged.
At one point, she just blew off a really important trade show that we all were doing booth duty
at.
My boss told me to fire her.
I fought for her job because I knew she was a good performer.
Then I had a heart for her.
I knew she had a young one at home.
She didn't have any other support.
I tried to support her.
I called her in to have a hard conversation with her and she quit at my desk that day
and swearing at me, swearing at the company, stomped out.
I had to go out and talk to the rest of my sales team shortly after that.
It was our Monday morning weekly huddle.
Here's the lesson I learned.
She stomped out.
By the way, there was no good solution.
She didn't just quit our company.
She went to work for a competitor and took business from us.
But here's the lesson I learned that day, that Monday when I finally got my courage
enough up to walk out into the bullpen where my team was sitting that she had just stomped
through a few minutes before.
Before I could say anything, one of my other salespeople said, well, it took you long enough.
I thought I had fired her because they all knew she needed to go.
I was the one that was not having the hard conversations.
They all thought I finally manned up.
Only later did it come out that no, I still had tried to wimp out, but she could quit
on us.
Well, that was a lesson for me.
In fact, her name was Gwen.
I call it the Gwen Axiom.
This timelessly true principle.
Just because someone is hurt doesn't mean they're right.
And I was trying to address her hurt without really doing the right thing for the rest
of my team.
They knew that I was being played.
That's major too, to try to balance that out.
But that's what makes you good at what you're doing right now is for the simple fact that
so many people can get the things that you didn't do so well back then and actually take
that piece.
Yeah.
Yes.
And it's not often that leaders such as yourself can give that back.
And after 25 years, there's a lot of different leaders now.
These leaders are 25 and 20 without experience.
So I'm amazed sometimes in whom that I may go somewhere and I'm like, hey, can I speak
with a manager?
And they're younger than me.
I know.
And the conversation is so flipped in my mind, respectfully, I'm saying, I think I could
do your job better than you.
However, I have to respect your position, but I also have a choice to stay or leave.
Yeah.
Exactly right.
Well, and I think the last four years really have been like 10 or 15 years culturally in
our country and been so many good truths that have been brought back to the forefront.
We're all having to be more honest about things.
I also think though, at times there's this kind of empathetic leader that goes too far
where it's, was it a year and a half ago, the crying CEO on LinkedIn who had to lay
people off and was in tears over that.
I don't know the whole backstory, but I would say, you know what?
One of the jobs of a leader is to protect their enterprise.
And if that means you've got to lay some people off, you're doing the leadership thing.
And so I think we come and go and, you know, in the swim school world I live in, there's
a movement right now called gentle parenting where you just don't push the kid at all out
of their comfort zone.
Well, I will tell you 90% of two-year-olds don't like to have their face put underwater.
But if you get them safe in the water, we have to be a submersion school.
And sometimes leaders have to do things that people aren't thrilled with.
And that's where, man, it's just a, it's a hard job.
Who would want to be a leader?
You know, you never know what you can take and what you can do.
And unless you're pushed to that level and being pushed to that level, whether it be
a child or an adult, it's a necessary growth need in order to take that step forward.
So I can, I totally understand what you're saying and to be kind of your time at our
28 minutes.
I want to just thank you so much for choosing to be here and choosing to have this discussion.
I swear every time I come out here, it's like I'm talking to a friend.
You know, it's, I get the, I get the benefit of being able to hear visions and, and you're,
although you are the professional in this, I tell you, I learn every day and I appreciate
the, you know, the, the nuggets and the tools that you're giving me, regardless of, you
know, where I'm at and what I'm doing, I can, I'm, I'm going to always want to learn.
And so for anybody that is watching this, I think that, you know, they'll, they'll have
a need and an understanding of what, you know, your business is all about because it's not,
it's not just the, the hunky dory easy coaching and, and, you know, and not to say anything
about coaching, but I don't think you have an easy job.
Yeah.
You, you know, you, you sort of get them to grow and go, but you still have some fine
tuning and after 25 years, the world is changing.
The world is changing so much.
And yes, and I thank you so much.
You bet.
Well, it's been my pleasure.
The one resource I do want to make available to your folks, if, if they want to learn more
about how to hold hard conversations, I've got a little ebook, the three imperative leadership
conversations, a coaching conversation, a hard conversation in the threefold affirmation
conversation.
It's available at leadershipmaterials.com, simply leadershipmaterials.com.
And then you and I owe each other a breakfast taco breakfast in San Antonio to try to win
you over 20 year Texan.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time
and attention.
I hope you have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro
on your own.