Why Every Thought Leader Needs a Plan Before They Publish Writing a book isn’t just…
Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 71 – Nathan Regier
Our guest today says that knowing how to use “soft” skills makes up 50% or more of an employee’s performance. Do you agree?
Nathan Regier, CEO of Next Element and author of “Conflict without Causalities,” joins Peter to discuss the changes in the corporate space. They investigate how modern businesses rely on concepts of transparency, openness, and creating a culture of safety.
Listen in as Peter and Nathan discuss the “Peter Principle,” and the value of keeping your relationships strong. They talk about ways and reasons to switch your sales mode, and the slow train of effects that take place after your book is published.
If you want to scale your content to make more profit, Peter has advice for you.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on our podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today my guest is Nate Regier. Nate is the Chief Executive Officer of Next Element. He’s a former practicing psychologist. He’s got a doctorate in clinical psychology. He’s an expert in social and emotional intelligence. He’s the speaker, he’s an author. His last book was called Conflict Without Casualties and he’s here to share with us today. So. Welcome aboard, Nate.
Nathan Reiger Great to be here, Peter, and welcome to your audience.
Peter Winick So let’s just sort of dive in here. Today, there’s a variety of things that you do at Next Element, right? Based on your content and your frameworks and your methodologies. Why don’t you give us, sort of paint us a picture of the things that you as an author and a thought leader and speaker and how that connects to your current business.
Nathan Reiger Absolutely. Well, at the highest level, I’m in the leadership development field. And I have to confess, I am a recovering psychologist. Not because I don’t like psychology, I really value that background, but because things are changing so fast. And we’re constantly relearning and growing. I would say at the high level, in leadership, more specifically, I specialize in my company specializes in the nuances of communication, when there’s diverse personalities in the room and when there is conflict. That is our passion. That’s our area of expertise that we focus on. And we definitely bring a social sciences background to that because of my background in psychology.
Peter Winick So I would imagine any time there’s more than two or three people, there’s diverse personalities and conflict are probably going to bubble up. So how did you make the transition or how did decide to make the transition from a practicing psychologist to doing what you’re doing on the leadership development side, which is more of a business play, right? So your stage now is no longer, you know, individuals and couples and that sort of but it’s the interactions amongst. people in a professional setting, so what made you decide to make that transformation?
Nathan Reiger It was two things, one was I had the good fortune of being exposed to some corporate work through employee assistance programs and through a division in my behavioral health organization that worked with corporate groups. So I got to experience it and really liked it. Good fit for my personality, good fit for style. The second thing was I always struggled with the clinical medical model of helping people where they had to be diagnosed as broken or damaged before we could somehow help them. It never worked with me. I’ve always been focused on the positives, focused on strengths and meeting people where they’re at and moving from there.
Peter Winick Excellent. So only so many hours in the day or the week, right? Only so many things you can do. How do you balance the sort of content development, the creative side of the house, right. Writing books and creating things and sort of all those pieces with the business demands, you know, you, if you don’t serve X amount of clients and revenue doesn’t get generated and all that. So give me, give me a sense of how you balance those.
Nathan Reiger That’s a great question, Peter. And it’s been an evolving process. Part of it has to do with knowing myself, my own personality, how I’m motivated, and when I can do what kind of work. For example, I’m most creative in writing in the mornings and so I get up pretty early and do most of that work before anyone in my house even gets up. Probably a good hour of time spent just there. I tend to be more… our team is more fresh in the morning. So we do a lot more of kind of team development, idea generation, some of that stuff in the mornings when we’re fresh and we’re engaged and we are less likely to get stressed out. And then in the afternoons, we’re a lot on our own pursuing our individual agendas and working on our different tasks. And I’m really religious about cutting off when I’m in town, cutting off four or five o’clock, getting to the gym, getting a walk in with my wife, being with my family in the evenings whenever I can. so I can achieve that balance.
Peter Winick So, give me a sense of some of the things that you’re seeing on the corporate side that maybe you didn’t see a few years ago, some things that are bubbling up to the top now where they’re, you know, corporate is saying, yeah, this is something that we want to take on. This is something we see a benefit. that this is something that will impact our business if we work on it. Can you give me some examples there?
Nathan Reiger Yeah, the timing is great because the train is coming. You can probably hear it in the background. And the train that is coming into the station incorporates… focus on openness, transparency, and creating a culture of safety. And I think we’re really, the pendulum is swinging from such extreme focus on productivity, efficiency, lean, all of that, really focusing back towards, we have to balance out having a place to work where we feel safe, where we feel curious, where we trust each other and recognizing the human side. And so. There’s not only a greater demand for soft skills of communication and conflict in the workplace, but a greater demand for leaders to be open, accessible, gifted people when it comes to communication.
Peter Winick So let’s go there for a bit because I think culturally and historically and in some places geographically, the soft skills thing has been a hard sell, right? So we all know intuitively, emotional intelligence is critical, listening skills are critical, collaboration skills, all the core pieces of soft skills, but you still have so many companies where the culture, they don’t want to talk about those things or they don’ want to go there or they won’t invest in it or they’ll hit you with the, well, what’s the ROI on that? How do you deal with those issues? And how would you sort of respond to the green shaded CFO saying, well, what’s the ROI of a good initiative of this sort?
Nathan Reiger Yeah, it is a hard sell and one of the reasons it’s a hard sell is because the because of the Peter principle, it’s people get promoted because of their technical skill, and then they get put in charge of other people, but they’re not ever trained to have leadership. And so they just keep getting promoted beyond their level of competence. And then we wonder what happened. And we’re not we’re doing ourselves any favors by promoting only for technical skill. But the Research is really clear on the value. of attending to relationships, attending to communication skills. Consistently, when we look at surveys of leaders and we look what drives performance, within the top 10 drivers, usually the six or seven of those drivers all have to do with soft skills. And more and more now, as leaders are changing positions, changing jobs, changing areas of technical expertise, the only thing that is consistent is people skills. And add to that, some really good research in 08 on global conflict shows that we spend about two to three hours a week just dealing with drama. And in America, it costs about $350 billion a year in lost productivity and revenue. And most leaders might not be able to put their finger on it, but they feel it in their gut and it drives them crazy and it keeps them up at night.
Peter Winick So if you can integrate into your conversations with a potential client, that $350 billion number at scale, and to your point, they feel it in their gut, but it might not show up on a P&L or a budget or something like that, right? So they know it’s there, it exists, and they could use some help with that, interesting. Give me a sense of how you find clients, right, so at the end of the day, you’ve got to find enough clients to keep yourself and your organization busy. What are the things that you’re doing specifically with thought leadership, whether that’s your book or you’re speaking or et cetera, et cetera that help you, uh, find new clients or help, I should say, maybe help new clients find you.
Nathan Reiger Great question. And I’ve listening to one of your podcasts recently where there was a great conversation about that kind of stimulated my thinking on that recently. We are we are in the midst of changing our target market from companies where we provide direct services consulting coaching kind of hourly daily retainer kind of work to looking for training companies and successful trainers and coaches who want to bring our tools on board. for their clients. And so we now have, we have a dual kind of dual tracks in terms of our target markets. But I leverage thought, I leverage my thought leadership as an author in both of those ways by the kind of writing that I do and the posting that I around valuable tips and tools for leaders who can use this to become better at what they do. And then hopefully they might be interested in hiring us to come work with their teams. On the other hand presenting ways in which our tools solve problems so that trainers and training companies might say, man, I want that tool to go solve the problems of my customers. And so part of my job as a thought leader is identifying problems and guiding people to being aware of solutions and then giving them a little bit of that, at least for free.
Peter Winick But I wanna pull back, because there’s a lot packed into what you said there. The first thing is, one model is direct client, right? So that’s a model that you use, you’re selling your services into a client, and there’s certain set of things that one would do in that space, right, how do you find the clients, how do service them, et cetera. But now you’re talking about finding other folks that have clients, and then you’re becoming either a licensor or selling your tools into them. totally different business model, right? It’s B2B to B2P, right. So I want to talk about that a little bit. So tell me a little about the pluses and minuses of going direct to client, and then what caused the, what was the light bulb that said, hmm, I think I want go this way, because they’re not mutually exclusive, but they operate very, very differently as a business. Same content, the end user, the employee number whatever at company X is going to get the same thing, but totally different underlying business models and drivers. Could you talk to that a little bit?
Nathan Reiger Yeah, absolutely. And I like how you framed that. It’s definitely a shift. The pros of direct-to-client work, at least to how we’ve experienced it, is they love it. Every day, clients are saying, oh, this is great. Thanks for making a difference. You were here for us. We really love your tools, blah, blah blah. So we’re popular. And it feels good. And word of mouth gets us business. 90% of our business in the first five years of our company was word of mouths. And networking and relationships and being in the community is a phenomenal way to get business in that market. However, we got too busy and we started our own company because we wanted to be in charge of our destiny. And so we got to a point where we were limited only by our time and our boundaries. At the same time, we were starting to develop some of our own methodologies that we thought could have value beyond us and beyond kind of the personality that you’re hiring. And so that began the shift about creating materials and assessments and models that can stand on their own and that we can then train trainers to use. So developing a whole train the trainer model and starting to say, wait, our target market now is not companies. It is departments within companies, training companies, and those people that are looking for new tools for their toolkit. And so now we have to start figuring out how to help them not only know about what we do, but connect the dots between the problems their clients have and the solutions that we offer.
Peter Winick Well, and it’s not just helping them. We, we use a lot of, uh, client avatars for ourselves and for our clients. Right. So if you, you know, if you think about the client avatar of a corporation that could use your work versus the client, avatar of either a, uh you know, a trainer inside of a company or a service provider to them, totally different needs, totally different objectives, et cetera, and you’ve got to be able to meet them where they are. So it’s interesting to me in terms of how you go about. finding those types and servicing them. So it seems like, have you made a, is it a binary switch? Is it a transformation? Is it you’re doing both? Give me a sense of what it looks like then.
Nathan Reiger It’s both. And that in trying to do both, I think we sometimes don’t do either one as well as we could. And, and that’s, that’s the problem with not focusing. The thing is, is that our direct client work is also the laboratory where we’re trying and developing and learning and having firsthand experience with the tools that we’re sharing with our network of certified licensors or licensees. The upside of that is that we can scale, we can get greater margins, we can benefit from automation, we can affect more lives. The downside is that we don’t get to be popular anymore. Now we’re the people that they call and say, oh, the website’s not working, or can I translate your materials into Chinese? Or now we have customers that want different things than just our content expertise.
Peter Winick And you have to be of service to them in order to be successful, right? Because they have-
Nathan Reiger Absolutely
Peter Winick Let’s talk about the book, Conflict Without Casualties, fairly recent book, right? Give me a sense of the decisions that you made to write the book and then what you’re experiencing now that the book is out in the world.
Nathan Reiger This book, Conflict Without Casualties, has been very significant for our company because the first book I wrote, Beyond Drama, was we self-published it. It was more about just our current thinking at the time. And everybody’s gotta write that first book. And so I don’t think it’s the greatest piece of work in the world, but at least we got our stuff out there. The second book really was our attempt to codify our thinking, our model, our paradigm into a really readable, actionable book that could be both popular reading for an executive on a plane flight, or it could also be the Bible for the reference guide when we’re doing training. And so that really was the pivotal point for us where I put myself out there as a thought leader in this area. We proposed to the world what we believed in, and then we launched a whole training and coaching system based off of it. a lot of people will write a book and then start spinning off training systems to go with it. We already had the whole training and coaching system first and then wrote the book to describe what we did. And so it really was a launching point where the book was a significant piece to start those conversations and give credibility of what we were doing.
Peter Winick So let’s talk about that because you literally become the guy that writes the book about that, that topic. So tell me a little bit about, you know, a year or two years ago in the pre book world versus now what’s different about the interactions that you’re having with potential clients and people. Uh, and again, the world hasn’t radically changed and I’m sure your business didn’t grow 20 X or something, but just give me, you know, intuitively, how has that changed? What was the benefit? You know, was it worth the effort? What are you starting to see?
Nathan Reiger Definitely worth the effort. I’m on your podcast.
Peter Winick Thank you.
Nathan Reiger That’s one big difference. Well, but let’s talk about that now very much. Yeah, a big difference is having a book that. is getting good reviews from notable authors and and people are liking it, I get to have a voice I get the privilege of having a platform like right here today to talk about what we do and what we believe in. So that’s a huge thing. Also, though, is working with a publisher and working with the publicist, I’ve had to become so much more disciplined in being a partner in making that successful. It’s it’s hard work. And it requires a lot of diligence in terms of writing and being on podcasts and being out there and speaking, um, and hitting the road. So it’s, it’s both been added credibility for us, but also a whole new line of work.
Peter Winick So give me a sense of maybe a surprise that I thought that when I wrote a book, someone else would do X or whatever. What’s surprising to you in this sort of post-book phase of your world? Oh, and there goes the train again, there we go.
Nathan Reiger Yep, love the train. What is surprising to me, I can draw a metaphor. The train I got hit by after I wrote the book was- Hold on, hold on. I’ve never used this on the board. I was warned, you know, don’t expect that just because a publisher picks up your book, it’s magically going to become a New York Times bestseller, you got you got to work too. And I knew that but yet I, I think I had hoped for something magical to happen once it was published with a publisher.
Peter Winick Oprah didn’t show up at your door with a warm pie.
Nathan Reiger Yeah, and it hasn’t it simply hasn’t. It’s just been a slow steady hard work and they told us that we’d sell more books in the second year than in the first year and That’s true. And so it’s just a slow. Steady thing
Peter Winick And you know, I think the that second year issue is interesting because sort of the traditional book industrial complex treats a book as a seasonal item, like clothing or something like that, right? Yeah. You know, it’s cheaper to buy a winter coat in July or something like that. But the reality is, you know you should be looking at the book as an author, you’re making a huge investment of your time and your energy and your resources as amortizing that effort over at least a five year cycle, right? Because if I take that book and throw it in somebody’s hands in a year, two or three from now, it is less valuable to that potential client of yours at that point in time than it would be to someone today.
Nathan Reiger That’s so encouraging and, and thank you because that’s how, that’s, how we need to look at it. And, and it’s a, it’s long steady thing and we’re trying to grow a global network of certified trainers that are using our model and that book is the core foundation of it. And so three, four, five, 10 years from now, the stuff I wrote about is timeless. You know, there’s nothing that new under the sun. It’s just about articulating in a way that is impactful and relevant for people in today’s.
Peter Winick business. And the last thing I’d say about that is, oftentimes people, when they’re in book mode, are thinking so big. And listen, there’s nothing wrong with thinking big. But the combination of thinking big and being logical and pragmatic. One of the activities I always take clients through say, listen, let’s think about 100 people, actual people by name, let’s just figure this out. That if we got the book in their hands, could be life altering to you. And it’s not necessarily a sexy activity or cool, you know, we’ll get on the today show sort of thing but like you know, depending on your, your, your space or whatever it is, it could be a certain title in an organization or a certain function or a certain whatever. And let’s work our tails off to get our books through, you know through relationships directly, whatever it is into those people’s hands and see what happens because the, the barrier entry shouldn’t be the $20 at the book cost because that, you know, who cares about the couple dollars that you make or whatever. It’s using it as an entree into a net new client that could be substantial for you. So anyway, my two cents there. Lastly, as we wind down here today, before the next train knocks us off there, what would you suggest to someone or, or advise someone that’s where you were a couple of years ago when you were just about to embark on the, uh, the journey of becoming an author and getting a book out there, do this, don’t do that, whatever, whatever advice you might
Nathan Reiger I would say definitely don’t be afraid to put down on paper and put out there what you believe in and what you’re passionate about. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be you today. And people will people will resonate with it and it will find the people that it needs to speak to. And then also partner with good people. We partnered with a fabulous, fabulous publisher, I’ll put a shout out to Barrett and a fabulous publicist. and a great publicist and the three of us, we made a team and we worked really, really hard together and surrounding yourself with good people and doing the work and is the recommendation I would have and take every opportunity to speak about it. The more you do it, the easier it gets and the better it gets and the more compelling and passionate you get about your message and people need to hear it.
Peter Winick Well said, Nate, I appreciate your time. I thank you so much for modeling exactly what you said by being transparent with us today here. So I appreciate that very much. And we will put your contact information in the show notes so people can find you and I wish you the best of everything. Thank you so.
Nathan Reiger You’re very welcome. Appreciate this opportunity.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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