Executive Podcast #217: Leading in Volatile Times with Joel Manby

Joel Manby is the former CEO of SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Herschend Family Entertainment, the largest family-owned theme park corporation in the United States.

Joel hosts the Maxwell Leadership Executive Circle, a 12-month group and individual mentoring program focused on Executive Leadership for those who are or desire to be C-suite leaders .

2023 and 2024 are setting up to be challenging times for leaders. How can leaders position themselves to lead during volatile times?

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Perry Holley:

Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results.

Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:

And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president of Maxwell Leadership. Welcome, and thank you for joining.

Just as a reminder, we want you to visit maxwellleadership.com/podcast. There we would love for you to leave a comment, ask a question of us, or if you’re interested in learning just a little bit more about how we’re helping organizations around the world with their culture, with their leadership development, even with their executives, which we’re going to talk a little bit about that today with our guest who we invited him back. We took a vote at the end of the last session, and we said, “Well, we’ll have Joel back.”

Perry Holley:

Two to one, I think it was two to one.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, it was two to one.

Perry Holley:

His vote swung it.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Joel Manby:

I voted to be back.

Chris Goede:

I’m not going to say which one…

Joel Manby:

Don’t go there.

Chris Goede:

But we’re super excited that Joel is back with us, because he’s led at such a high level and through so many different times, it’s so relevant to the topic that we’re going to talk about today.

If you didn’t listen to our last podcast, I want to invite you to go back and do that. He’s got 10 principles that really align with this work-from-anywhere culture that we’re in. We shared five of them last week. In the environment that we’re in today, I know that you’ll want to go and listen to that.

Joel, you’ve led through good times, you’ve led through bad times.

Joel Manby:

Yes.

Chris Goede:

As a CEO, as a leader inside an organization, we’re faced with new challenges every time that we go through that. Do you sense and feel in what’s going on in the world, the economy and organizations, that we are moving towards challenging times? Talk a little bit about that, and the importance of the coaching that you’ve been doing around this topic with some of the leaders that we work with.

Joel Manby:

Well, thanks, Chris. It’s great to be here, Perry and Chris.

To answer your question, it has been a very difficult time because of COVID, work-from-home culture, which was our whole topic last week, and that makes leading very difficult to begin with. Then you add what’s coming. I think we are in for an even more difficult time. I hate to say that, but everyone that I talk to is feeling it. People’s optimism is very low right now. Inflation’s going to stick with us. I think we’re heading into a recession. Everything points in that direction. So it’s really important if people, a lot of people on this podcast maybe haven’t led through a crisis before, we haven’t really had a huge one since ’07, ’08. COVID was quickly down, but pretty quickly back up. I do have some principles and thoughts to share about five things to think about when you’re leading through a crisis.

Perry Holley:

Well, I know we’re hearing from a lot of our clients that should they be thinking about, from a leadership point of view, is it easier or harder to lead in a challenging time. I mentioned I had a coaching call this morning where they said it can actually crisp up your leadership in challenging times and volatile times, and it might make it easier for some leaders. But what are you noticing? I know we got several points we want to get to, but just in a big picture, what is your overall counsel to leaders, when you’re looking at 2023, 2024 could be some real challenges out there?

Joel Manby:

Yeah. Well, the first thing is to realize those feelings that people are having, that they’re not alone. I can’t emphasize that enough. Everyone I talk to, you’re coaching a lot of people. I’m doing a lot of one-on-one mentoring. I have a lot of friends who are leaders. You are not alone right now if you’re feeling isolated, if you’re feeling a little bit scared about what’s coming, because these are unprecedented times.

What’s interesting about human nature, we are hardwired genetically, whether you believe the Big Bang or we’re created by God, whatever your theory is, we are wired for safety. We try to avoid conflict and pain. So when we see and feel pain coming, through inflation or layoffs coming, and you read it every day in the paper, it’s natural to feel uneasy in uncertainty. And when the future is so uncertain, why do we, as leaders, feel like we should be certain?

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Chris Goede:

Yeah, that’s good.

Joel Manby:

We feel like we have to be transparent and we should be. But the key thing is that we are adaptable, that we learn every day with what’s going on. It’s okay to change your plan. It’s okay to adapt. But it’s okay to feel uncertain right now.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, you don’t have to have all the answers.

Joel Manby:

No. Not at all.

Perry Holley:

What?

Chris Goede:

Yeah, we don’t have all the answers.

Joel Manby:

But I’d also say too, don’t go it alone. You’re not alone if you feel this way, but at least type A personalities, what I’ve seen is, when things get complex and scary, they tend to double down, and introverts get more introverted. And I think what can happen is we go to a very lonely place, and leadership is lonely anyway. But I’ll just give one example from me of an example of this. When ’07, ’08 hit Herschend Enterprises, it’s a theme park company, and our sales were down 35%. We had all this leverage because we had just purchased two companies, and we were up against our debt covenants where the bank might come in and say, “Hey, we’re going to take over your loan, call your loan.” You don’t want that. We had to hit a certain number and it was big, and I was taking it all on myself.

And one of the greatest moments in my leadership life is I put it to my leadership team. I said, “We have to find $100 million here or we’re going to be in trouble.” And I thought we had to layoff probably 20% of our people. My team came back a day later and they said, “We can get to this figure if everybody takes X pay cut, we cut these projects, and we don’t have to lay anybody off.” The whole Dollywood company, every leader agreed to take at least a 10% cut. The senior leaders a 25% cut, voluntarily, so that they wouldn’t have to lay people off and we could hit our number. And my main point of all that is don’t go it alone, and being transparent’s okay, it creates trust.

Chris Goede:

That is so good.

Perry Holley:

I love that story.

Chris Goede:

That is so good. Not only that, but as a leader, just, I mean the release, you must have felt.

Joel Manby:

Oh, my gosh.

Chris Goede:

Weight lifted off your shoulder. Then your ability to then even lead more effectively, to create, to take care of the people, which as you listen to Joel and you listen to our conversation last week and this episode, you can just hear it through the principles of his leadership. And again, if you want more about that and just diving into his leadership and that, just talk about his book. Love Works. Perry and I love the book. He’s one of our thought leaders here at Maxwell Leadership. If you go to maxwellleadership.com and our store, we carry it there.

Joel Manby:

Thank you.

Chris Goede:

And there are other stories just like that, but the book is really about the principles that he has learned to lead through in that moment. So that was the first one in thinking about in volatile times where we’re at. The second one is you mentioned, move fast. And I love this because John says things are faster than they’ve ever been. And here you are saying, okay, so things are going to be slowing down maybe in the economy in the world, and people are scared. But as leaders, we need to be moving faster. Talk a little bit about this, and unpack it for our audience.

Joel Manby:

I’ve been through a number of crises as a CEO or just as a leader, and if I could pick one mistake I see most frequently is people don’t move fast enough. They think things are going to get better, and they don’t have the courage, which we’ll get to courage in a minute, but they don’t move fast enough. And when cash is king, everyone right now really that’s listening should look at their department, even their family, even their home life or their company. What can we cut that’s not mission critical? How can we raise sales faster? What projects don’t need to be done that we had on the docket? And that’s on the expense side, but capital projects too. Just all the new ideas or new software that you want to put in place, we have to reevaluate every single thing. And great leadership does that. So all those things are hard and people don’t want to do them, but no matter what you’re leading, it’s important to move fast.

Chris Goede:

That’s interesting. Absolutely.

Perry Holley:

I’m just thinking of a call you and I were on, Chris, you and I were on last week where someone told us about that their big deal they were going to do. And they had it almost signed. And then everybody reassessed and said, you know what? We’re going to wait on that. And they pulled back from the commitments they had for some large land purchases and some large investments, capital investments and saying, just going to pause for a bit.

Joel Manby:

Yeah, Perry, I’m glad you brought that point up because when I say move fast, it doesn’t mean to move fast to make action happen. It’s to make the decision to preserve cash fast. And a lot of times saying no to a deal or waiting for another year or two on that deal is the right decision right now.

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Perry Holley:

Well, I don’t know, we mentioned it at the top, but Joel does run our executive circle. It’s the CEO coaching and has got some lessons, but he also do one-on-one coaching and mentoring with these CEOs. And these lessons that we’re discussing here, these five, they’re interspersed throughout the 12 month program. And the second one moving fast. Third one, I love the way this sounds, but it says construct a plan with courage over comfort. Courage over comfort.

Joel Manby:

Yeah. Well, when I talk about having a plan, it’s basically what is the plan to address the crisis? Whether it’s don’t do this deal, cut these expenses, and we have to communicate that over and over again. But at least in my experience, most leaders edge towards comfort because again, we’re wire. We talked about genetic wiring, we want to avoid pain, we want safety, we want… But if we move with courage to make the really difficult decisions and make them pretty quickly, then that’s what people are looking for in their leaders is everyone sees the tough decisions that need to be made so they want their leaders to do them. And I think that’s really, really important. But it’s also courage. When you make courageous decisions, it’s not being reckless. It’s not doing things that are ill advised, but it’s making those difficult decisions, whether it’s a big price increase or laying off people. And again, people are looking for us to lead.

Chris Goede:

I know one of the things that you talk about when it comes to leading with courage is being transparent. With your story you gave a little while ago about your leadership team, here’s where we’re at. But I think it’s even further than that. I think to be a courageous leader, no matter what the times are, is to be transparently leading and communicating with clarity and other things to your team. Would you agree with that? Would you say that through the times that you’ve led through when you were more transparent or authentic with your team, that was when you were able to rally the troops and keep them together at a greater level?

Joel Manby:

Absolutely. It’s such a great point because transparency creates trust, and there’s a balance. There’s a balance between they want their leader to be strong and kind of communicate what’s coming. But you have to be honest. And the best example I can think of for that for me was at SeaWorld when the animal activists were protesting our parks and we, make a long story short, had to choose to stop breeding our marine mammals our orcas, which was not liked by a lot of the people inside the company. And I had to go. I flew to each park and met with the animal trainers and had to look them in the eye and say, “We’re not going to breed anymore and here is why.” And by bringing them into that, they didn’t like it, but they understood it. And they kind of said, if I was in your shoes, I would have to do the same thing. So being transparent and having that balance of when to share and when not to share, it’s an art, but definitely air on the side of transparency.

Perry Holley:

I was wondering, it sounds kind of obvious, most leaders say yes, I definitely chose courage over comfort. But when you’re mentoring C level type, do they know? You said they tend to go more comfort. It’s built into our natural wiring, but do they sense that or do they need outside point of view? How does…

Joel Manby:

At least for me, they tend to share it because leadership is very lonely. At least I have found it to be, especially the higher up, so to speak, you go in an organization. If they aren’t a little bit that way, I get concerned about them. If they’re a bull in the China shop and they’re just running hard without being attuned to their courage, then I get worried. I like the people who admit that they struggle a little bit with the comfort and moving away from it.

Chris Goede:

Well, we’ve hit on this a little bit throughout a couple of these discussions, but your fourth point here, leading during these type of times is to communicate consistently. Talk a little bit about that and the importance of that when leading through volatile times.

Joel Manby:

Well, we talked about a little bit on the last podcast, but for those who missed it, the difference between or the importance of clarity, lack of clarity is cruelty. But there’s a difference between clarity and certainty. And I think a lot of leaders, we want to be certain. We want to tell people there will be no more layoffs or this recession’s only going to be three months, or COVID is going to be over in a year. And so we try to be certain, we can’t. We are uncertain, and we cannot predict the future. So it’s important to be clear, but not necessarily certain. The second point though is I have seen way too many people, and I’ve made this mistake, try to predict the future. And so I’ve seen so many mistakes from the layoff announcements where people will say, “This is the last one, no more layoffs.”

And then they have to do it again, and they lose all credibility. I just saw the Amazon CEO, this is public information, he made that announcement that more layoffs were coming the next quarter. I think the way to do that is you communicate clearly what you know today. And you say, this is as far as we need to go today, but I cannot predict the future so that you leave yourself some wiggle room.

Chris Goede:

That’s good.

Perry Holley:

That’s really good.

Joel Manby:

But also to say we’re going to have a massive layoff next quarter, which he did, completely kills morale. So just deal with what you have today, and hopefully you only do that one or two times versus you come back with another layoff every other week. And it’s a death by a thousand cuts. That’s the worst possible situation.

Perry Holley:

For sure. Number five, as we start to wrap up, was be optimistic even when you don’t feel like it. Does that mean even when you’re not optimistic? Be optimistic.

Joel Manby:

And I think the question then becomes, well, are you being completely honest?

Chris Goede:

Right. You’re right.

Joel Manby:

And we talked about that balance. There are some things you just shouldn’t say to people because we’re all fearful. We all have that uncertainty. What if inflation goes to 12%? What if this recession lasts five years? What if sales don’t come back? But I think what we project, and when we talk to people, we can be honest, but we don’t have to give them all the information or everything that we’re afraid of. So that’s a balance. But in general, we should be positive because everyone’s watching. And if we aren’t positive about the future, who will be?

Chris Goede:

We talk about that. Everyone’s watching all the time. I mean, we just need to be aware of that. And we also talk about how leadership is contagious. And so to your point, you don’t want to be over the top and have your head in the sand, but you also want to have some of that energy behind the optimism of it so that your people can rest in that or know that hey, we’re aware, we know we’re in bad times, but we’re on this team together. And you get that kind of camaraderie built together just by being optimistic.

Joel Manby:

Absolutely. And by having a plan. If you have a plan and you’ve communicated it and people know we’ll get through this. And now, that plan may change every other week, but it’s just important to have that plan in place.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, I love what you said. I’m going to go back to, as I wrap up here, and then I’ll throw it to you, Perry. When you talked about under point number four about communicating consistently, I can remember during the pandemic the certain statements that would be made, and then a week later they would in the same organizations would be drastically changed. And then a week later they’re drastically changed. We’re just like, what do we believe here? Versus saying as of today, here’s what we’re doing. This is… And then just like you talked about with Amazon, not only are you going to lose productivity on those layoffs until the first quarter, but then what if it doesn’t happen in the first quarter? You’ve lost maybe 60 days of productivity, and then now you’re going to be telling a different story. So I love that of thinking, hey, how do I stay in the moment?

How do I be optimistic? And then just communicate consistently on what I know, and what I can share. ‘Cause to your point, we’re leaders. We’re not telling you, hey, start opening up the books, and let’s start talking about everything. No, no, no. Joel said it’s an art, and it’s a balance. And what I love about these conversations, and Perry mentioned it, is that Joel’s heart is to help leaders and executives, C-suite leaders that are in a lonely place. And some of you are listening to this and going, man, that is a true statement because leading is lonely at times.

And so he’s partnered with us. He came along as one of our thought leaders and wanted to start Executive Circle. If you’re interested in being part of one of those groups and taking that 12 month journey with Joel, not only in a group of other executives but one-on-one calls with Joel. And he was sharing with us just before we started this session, just the impact that he feels like he’s able to connect with people and help them through certain situations because what he’s been blessed to go through both positively and negatively.

And so if you’re interested in that, I’d love for you to go visit maxwellleadership.com/executive circle, and there’s a form on there. You can fill that out. One of our team will follow back up with you with more details. But Perry, why don’t you wrap it up for it. But thank you Joel, really appreciate that.

Perry Holley:

What a great conversation. And just a reminder, if you wanted the show notes from this, I’ll put all these five points that Joel had for us into the learner guide. You can get that there. You can also leave us a comment or a question. We love hearing from you. Do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast. Really love hearing from you and very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.